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| Leaving Traces... |
| Uncovering the politics of public space |
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While MACHINE was painting walls in Ekaterinburg and Moscow, and creating temporary light graffiti during the BeamMobile actions, they marked their pathways through the city with other temporary signs: Small stickers ushering short statements, designed with the same systematic font used for BeamMobile and the wall-paintings. These temporary traces mark and comment the urban landscape, with unexpected results...
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The urban landscape of Moscow seems out of control, or at least uncontrolled: Commercial messages dominate the city streets and devour the public space. Advertisements scream in your eye at every corner, at times covering entire buildings, stretching up to 8 floors high.
The juxtaposition of the many remnants of Soviet architecture and the new aggressive visuality of unleashed predatory capitalism gives Moscow an uncanny charm; in many ways the most post-modern city on earth, where the incommensurate collides at every street corner.
Yet, we found out quickly that not all appearances are what they seem....
In many cases, when retracing our steps, we found that stickers had already been removed from their temporary sites within 10 to 15 minutes! An amazing feat.... What seemed an uncontrolled or out of control space, in such tiny details, revealed itself as a tightly controlled system of signs...
What to think of the politics of public representation at play here?
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