Tindra Thor: Urban disruptions – On the political, spatial and artistic potentials of street art and graffiti

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Tindra Thor, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies, K3

The title of the seminar is Urban disruptions – On the political, spatial and artistic potentials of street art and graffiti.

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, April 15 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/616942916

Below you can find an abstract for the seminar:

Starting off in a story about an unexpected urban performance with an anonymous other, this presentation will explore the simultaneous critical and hospitable character of graffiti and street art as urban communicative disruptions. My talk is mainly based on my dissertation work, which is a performance ethnography of how makers of un-commissioned urban arts, specifically graffiti- and street art, (re)negotiate and create urban space through aesthetic and spatial interventions in Stockholm. In my research, I have explored studied these (artistic) performances as critical, anti-institutional and spatially subversive, primarily directing their critique against the logic of neo-liberalism, ownership and commodified public spaces. Following that logic, the artists sometimes also embrace a mission of emancipating the (mainstream) minds of people and awakening, what could be understood as, a zombification of society. During my talk I will walk through these critical stories and discuss them in relation to questions such as the right to the city; the urban space as democratic arena, spatial subversion, the becoming of art and politics, and artistic (un)freedom. I hope some of you will join me in this exploration of these anonymous, curious and precarious stories.

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