Local text, folklore and public art in an oil single-industry city: Almetyevsk

Abstract

This article describes an interdisciplinary effort between scholars, street artists and curators centered on a public art project, “Tales of the Golden Apples”, in an industrial Russian city. This project included research and analysis of the local identity of the city and the region, and translation of it into the language of art. The project's location determined the terms for a new methodological approach. A team of folklorists, religion scholars, ethnographers and urban anthropologists collected folklore beliefs and oral histories characteristic of the region in a series of surveys. An anthropological study based on more than 40 in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in Almetyevsk region. Street artists were then asked to create works of art based on oral histories and folklore material gathered by the researchers. It is important that it was specifically folklore and oral memories of the past that became the basis for the public art program, and this initiative may be called one of the possible applications of what R. Beals wrote of as “applied folklore” in the 1950s. According to the results of this applied research, we have identified three blocks of oral narratives transmitted by the residents of Almetyevsk: 1) the connection of the urban and the rural, 2) the peaceful co-existence of different ethnic and religious groups within the city, 3) the attempt of the establishment to join the cutting-edge urbanistic trend. The analytical paper was employed by the curators of the public-art program and artists to incorporate folklore and oral history into the space of the city. Street art and public art revealed the “ugly truth” about the city to its residents. The Defender mural by the artist Fikos in Almetyevsk has demonstrated how a public art painting can provoke active protest from the local community. Thus, redesigning urban space under the public art program was quite prone to instigate protest self-organization of local Russian and Tatar communities.