Whether we register them or not, the walls that we pass by are somewhere between a gallery and a media space. New content pops up on walls daily, ranging from that created by actual street artists themselves to various primarily decorative commercial murals to political messages of all kinds. Street artist Jana Danilović tells us about the walls in Serbia, and the messages they transmit.
Writing about murals and street art in a specific environment is always an intriguing task, given that the two are inseparable from the spaces, communities, and moments out of which they emerge. When discussing the instances of Serbia and Belgrade, the long-lasting, turbulent socio-political environment has played a role in the development of a wealth of the most varied public space interventions.
If we choose to tackle the subject superficially, the present moment is marked by colorful walls and a flourishing scene of authors focused on invigoration, enlightenment, and art experimentation in the city spaces. The image of a local community that is increasingly sensitized to pictures and drawings as a means of improving seemingly neglected public spaces, while traditional animosity towards loathed graffiti gradually fades, is plausible to the extent that a postcard is an authentic representation of a city. What that postcard view lacks is a wider context – social, political, ideological, economic, cultural, spatial, even historical.
The romantic illusion that a plethora of graffiti, murals, and other visual interventions in public spaces are proof of unrestrained freedom of expression in a city such as, for example, Belgrade, can be greatly deconstructed. Walls on which information, pictures, and messages appear and are transformed at the pace and intensity with which this occurs in Belgrade might be interpreted as evidence of freedom only superficially. It would be more accurate to say that this is about recognizing walls as a powerful means of reaching the widest audiences and occupying public spaces with the most diverse impulses. The impulse can be the need for artistic expression (whether it’s purely about aestheticization, or aims to transmit a socially engaging message), or the appropriation of the visual language, techniques, and aesthetics of graffiti and street art for non-artistic purposes.
Works that aim to visually enrich spaces with their presence without pretensions to spark any kind of examination or provoke a discussion, make up the segment of “wall events” that are happily and frequently photographed, abundantly distributed throughout social networks, and, altogether, much beloved by domestic and global audiences – they are colorful and offensive to no one. To examine the importance of such works, which are at times dismissed as hollow decoration, without more detailed scrutiny when analyzing the social relevance of murals and street art, context must be taken into account. How is it possible that, in fewer than twenty years, we have gone from a uniformly painted wall being deemed socially acceptable to the point at which communities of residential building dwellers happily cede their walls for illustration, and are even the ones initiating the painting of their neighborhood spaces?
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Author: Jana Danilović
