Authors

Discussion

This paper discusses three distinct case studies of graffiti on state infrastructure in Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia. We will look at Buzludzha, built from collective funds as the futuristic House of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, before becoming an abandoned relic and most recently undergoing a philanthropically-funded preservation process. In Ukraine, we will visit the persisting monument to Mykola Shchors who fought in the Red Army against the brief Ukrainian People’s Republic, and that was covered in graffiti calling for its destruction during a war in which most other public monuments were protected by sandbags. Finally, we will contemplate how, at the 2018 Carte Blanche Street Art Festival in Yekaterinburg, Russia, one artist challenged the set-up of an event that seemed to compliment Putin-era city beautification instead of supporting the freedom of expression that graffiti represents. The paper will consider how the graffiti (and to some extent, even the sites themselves) move between a space of being co-opted and resisting that co-option by the hegemonic narrative they exist to contest. It is not an effort to compare and contrast each very differently politically-charged site, but instead to consider graffiti and the hands that make it as a layer of interpretation just as deserving of our attention as the hands (and regimes) who made, uphold or decide the futures of its canvasses.