#banksyinstockholm - The Politics of Street Art and Spatiality

Abstract

In March 2014 Swedish news agencies received an anonymous handwritten letter stating that “Banksy”, probably the world’s most famous street artist, would hold his first “official unofficial exhibit in Sweden”. The validity of this press release was heavily debated throughout the week in Swedish media. Would this mythical street artist whose real name no one knows make an appearance in Stockholm? Could it be a PR stunt and if it were, would it be worth seeing anyway? On Sunday 23 March 8000 people gathered to find out. This article discursively explores the event as an urban moment of artistic and spatial improvisations in relation to ideas on spatial subversion, paradoxical space and aesthetic cosmopolitanism. The paradoxical space becomes as a temporal strategy, which holds the potential of displacing and resisting the hegemonic makings of urban space. Further the exploration of the event points to how a discursive construction of an event attaches and detaches signifiers to and from specific places, performances and symbolisms and how notions of place, performance and subjects are (re)negotiated in that process.

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