The Russian way of street art

Abstract

This article proposes an interpretation of Russian street art as a distinct ‘Russian way’ of street art, emerging at the intersection of late Soviet visual underground, post-industrial urban landscapes, and local traditions of folk art and folklore. Drawing on an extended interview with Anna Nistratova, curator and researcher of street art, the authors develop an analytical framework in which graffiti and street art are considered simultaneously as forms of contemporary textual and visual culture and as a variety of folk art embedded in regional heritage regimes and pre-revolutionary peasant heritage. The theoretical section situates Nistratova’s concepts within the fields of Russian and international street art studies, urban anthropology, and heritage studies, juxtaposing her insights with the works of H. Abarca, L. Nomeikaite, N. Samutina and O. Zaporozhets, V. Kumar, R. Schacter, among others. Particular attention is devoted to several nexuses: street art as a form of inheriting the ‘long’ folk past and artistic crafts; street practices as a therapeutic resource enabling engagement with traumatic ruptures in memory; the logocentric character of Russian street art, where words and texts serve as key carriers of meaning. The interview with Nistratova is analysed as a performative genre in which practice and theory mutually sustain one another: the voice of practitioner and theorist becomes an instrument for reconceptualising street art between vandalism, creative industry, and heritage. The accompanying annotated glossary of street art terminology fulfils a methodological function, connecting subcultural terms with academic categories and rendering visible the internal epistemology of the scene. ‘The Russian pathway of street art’ is a research narrative about how street art in the post-Soviet city simultaneously rewrites space, produces local identity, and restores interrupted lines of cultural memory, embedding itself within heritage regimes.