Research projects 2013

Natalia Samutina works on a project connected to the problem of “visibility” of graffiti and street art, on different scenarios of viewing experience they organize in the city space and on the transformations of the city space and city experience which street art provokes and highlights. Applying the resources of Visual Studies and Reception Studies, as well as such concepts as “Visual Modernity”, “Attractions”, “Vision”, “(In)visibility”, she tries to capture the specificity of graffiti and street art appearance, reception and disappearance in the city space in different cities, mostly Moscow, Hamburg and London – and to demonstrate the unnoticed or unperceived specificity of these cities via street art. Additional parts of the research deal with the question of street art as an object of tourism, and with the problem of uncomfortable images in city space.

Oksana Zaporozhets studies the ways street art challenges the perception of the Other in the City (making he/she not visible but, definitely tangible, embodied) and enriches urban imaginary, how street art contributes to the creation of new forms of urban sociality/communities. Her other research interests are in the fields of multi-sensual perception of the street art and practices connected to it as well as place-making. She will conduct a project on the graffiti-writing in the late Soviet period (Tsoi wall) as a grass root movement reshaping the spatial hierarchies of the Soviet city and creating new urban memorial culture.

Roman Abramov
"Political manifestations in graffiti and street art: the case of Moscow urban space"

Occasionally the city walls become sites of political struggle. Political and civil movements use resources of street art and graffiti to promote their ideas and messages, turn inscriptions and images into the means of mobilization. Focusing on Moscow graffiti and street art, the research is aimed to classify communities that actively use graffiti and street art in propaganda and political struggle. In addition to it the role of street art and graffiti in the construction of civil identities and protest mobilization will be investigated, ideological representation of objects in graffiti and street art will be described and the government reaction to the political street-art and graffiti will be analyzed.

Anna Petukhova
"Graffiti and street art on the Internet: representation, perception, and distribution"

Most writers take photos of the inscriptions/images they made and then disseminate them via Internet. Through my research, I want to find out the answers to the following questions:

How do writers make photos and present their work: do they focus on the process of writing or only on results?
How do writers describe their work (in photo captions, as comments on their work)? Do they map their images?
How are their works shared online?
What discussions evolve around works? Does the author join the discussion?

The object of my research is photo representations of graffiti and street art. My study includes the analysis of social networking platforms (facebook, flickr, vkontakte, livejournal etc.) and interviews with writers.

The key concepts in my research are social-networking-site behavior [M. A. Stefanone, D. Lackaff, D. Rosen) and photo sharing [D. Palmer]. I also refer to the studies of social media [N. Zheng, Q. Li, S. Liao and L. Zhang, etc.].

Varvara Kobyshcha, Alisa Maximova
"Graffiti as an ambivalent cultural phenomenon"

The project we are going to conduct this year is devoted to graffiti as an ambivalent object that exists in everyday context but has the ability to transgress meaningful social boundaries and collective representations. We focus on situations when it provokes strong emotional reactions, public debates and controversial interpretations (as beautiful or disgusting, valuable or polluting, acceptable or criminal etc.). These observable characteristics of collective perception indicate that in some cases graffiti becomes a breakdown in routine order of everyday social live.

Our aim is:

to reconstruct basic cultural categories which constitute order and condition ambivalent status of graffiti;
to explore spatial, aesthetic and situational characteristics of graffiti which make it significant and problematic for urban community.

We use cultural sociological theory [J. Alexander, B. Giesen, M. Douglas, V. Turner etc.] and a number of relevant empirical studies of graffiti and street art [T. Cresswell, L. Dickens etc.] as a conceptual basis for our research project.

Alexandra Kolesnik

Constructing own past: history in the practice of Russian graffiti and street art community"

I am interested in the practices of “writing the history” of street art and graffiti by the crews of writers and groups of street artists. History writing creates the narration and installs it in more general historical narrative. The processes of “archiving” and documentation of graffiti as ephemeral phenomena are very appealing for me.

I will address the following questions:

How do Russian graffiti and street art groups understand themselves in regard to their own history, other groups, their predecessors?
How are these groups documented and historicized? How are graffiti’s official and unofficial histories archived and recorded?
Whether or not the histories of the Russian graffiti and street art are different from each other?

As a methodological base I use contemporary Cultural Studies of Graffiti and Street Art and the concepts of historical memory and historical narratives [P. Nora, H. White, F. Ankersmit etc.].

Ekaterina Riise
"Street-artography: rediscovering the urban topography (case study on street-art in abandoned cities)"

In my research project I would like to trace the way mobility constitutes visibility of city sites and cities in general. I focus on places that become visible because of artistic intervention: abandoned sites and cities. The theoretical framework of the research is urban studies and the new mobilities approach [O. Jensen].

Travelling of street-artists and their works, photographers and tourists can be described through the notion of mobility. It creates the network of destinations of interest, the geography of street-art based on its own unique map.

In this project, I am interested in:

Mobility as a way to discover new stages and contexts: How street art reshapes the image and history of the city?
Practices that go together with street art: photography, tourism and representation in the web (abandoned Soviet cities in Germany and Chernobyl, Ukraine).
Street art in abandoned areas as social project that draws attention to a problematic context and reshapes the "reality" and everydayness of the place (Detroit Beautification project by Revok).