Introductory article.

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.

This article examines the transformation of visual strategies of character representation in illegal graffiti and street art, as well as in institutionalised muralism. It focuses on figurative imagery as a distinct mode of visual expression through which shifts in regimes of urban visibility, authorial autonomy, and visual politics in Russian cities can be traced. The first part of the article explores the character as a borderline visual element positioned between the subcultural logic of name-writing in graffiti and the public legibility of images in street art. Although non-figurative forms quantitatively dominate, characters in graffiti become key sites for the problematisation of subjectivity and the claim to the right to the city. The second part analyses muralism as a legalised form of street art that actively incorporates strategies of urban commemoration and normative communication, while still allowing for instances of authorial originality. The turn towards anthropomorphic imagery in institutional muralism is interpreted not as a replacement of graffiti and street art, but as evidence of shifting regimes of visibility surrounding illegal art and the changing functions of characters within the urban environment. The theoretical framework draws on the concept of the right to the city and its regimes of presence and absence, as interpreted by Marcia Tiburi, alongside the works of Henri Lefebvre, Jan Assmann, and contemporary street art scholarship. The interdisciplinary methodology combines visual analysis, historiographical review, a case study of a Russian city, sociological and anthropological approaches, comparative analysis, and the study of the author’s own creative practice.

Article analyzes “bas-reliefing” as an emerging practice within contemporary street art. The empirical basis of the study consists of materials collected between 2023 and 2025, including 10 in-depth interviews with street artists, interviews with curators and city residents, participant observation at art events, and a visual archive of 300 photographs of bas-reliefs.

The aim of the study is to identify the motivations behind artists’ turn to bas-reliefs and to analyze their interactions with urban space and audiences. The study examines the differences between prepared and unprepared audiences, the spatial logic guiding the placement of bas-reliefs, and the performative component of communication between street artists and city residents.

The author conceptualizes bas-reliefs as a form of street art that allows artists to maintain a dialogue with the city, circumvent institutional and censorship restrictions, and develop new ways of appropriating and understanding the urban environment.

The author concludes that bas-reliefs act as a tactical form of exercising the “right to the city”, allowing artists to maintain a presence in public space without directly confronting institutional strategies of control. The distinction between trained and untrained audiences reveals a multiplicity of modes of interpreting bas-reliefs: from their perception as vandalism to emotional appropriation and inclusion in personal memory practices. The performative nature of bas-reliefs dictates specific scenarios of interaction with city residents: accidental discovery, tactile contact, and the possibility of appropriation. Overall, bas-reliefs can be viewed as an emergent form of street art that adapts to normative pressures through their small scale, physicality, and tactical invisibility.

Thе article presents the findings of a study of the Krasnenkaya Biennale, an annual open-air contemporary art exhibition held in a peripheral district of St. Petersburg on the banks of the Krasnenkaya River. The research aimed to examine the narratives that emerge around public urban space in the context of a temporary art project. The authors set out to identify how permanent and temporary users perceive and use this space; analyze how these narratives construct a symbolic boundary between the project’s participants and “the locals”; and explore the connection between these narratives and the structure of the contemporary art field in Russia.

The authors analyze interviews with biennale participants (artists and visitors) and local residents, as well as materials from participant observation conducted at the 2025 Krasnenkaya Biennale. The biennale site is perceived by all its users as dirty, dangerous, and peripheral. However, artists and visitors also describe this marginal space in “romantic” terms (as non-standard, “liminal”) and engage in symbolic territorial marking by creating an art “city” within it. Discursively, artists and visitors separate themselves from the negative characteristics of this place (standardized, marginal) and its permanent users, yet they simultaneously depend on it. Precisely this isolated space, shielded from the gaze of the state and the general public, enables the creation of the public sphere necessary for the existence of the artistic community.

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, the authors demonstrate

that the marginality of the Krasnenkaya Biennale’s venue becomes a resource for artists to legitimize their position within the field of contemporary art. The properties of this location signal the non-commercial, non-institutional nature of the art exhibited there, thereby endowing it with the status of “authentic”. At the same time, the characteristics of the community surrounding the Krasnenkaya Biennale protect artists from the risks associated with accumulating symbolic capital in the contemporary art field.

This article explores the visual landscape of Philippine cities through the lens of regulatory and prohibitive signage. Using the framework of informal urbanism, the study examines how citizens navigate and “fix” their environments through informal communication. The work analyzes the typology and primary themes of these signs, which reflect the acute infrastructural challenges of overcrowded settlements: a lack of public toilets, waste management issues, and complex epidemiological conditions. The author compares official and private signage — focusing on handwritten notices — to demonstrate how these signs express power dynamics, the blending of languages and cultures, emotional factors, politeness versus rudeness, and the specific interests of property owners and vendors.

Linguistic aspects are examined, including the use of national languages (English and Filipino/Tagalog), regional lingua francas such as Cebuano and Ilocano, and indigenous languages such as Ifugao. The study further highlights creative orthographic strategies and ‘orthographic play’, such as the use of English numerals as phonetic components in vernacular words (e.g, “D2” for dito or “Hi2” for hitu), reflecting the influence of digital literacy and SMS conventions on physical signage. A specific section is dedicated to notices addressing traditional betel nut chewing; rather than banning the practice itself, these signs specifically target the spitting of red saliva in public and commercial spaces. This highlights the clash between long-standing cultural practices and modern urban hygiene requirements.

Special attention is given to the broader social functions of handwritten prohibitive signs: territorial marking and social control, the transmission of private discourse, and the aestheticization of prohibitions related to the “bodily lower stratum”. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the carnivalesque and grotesque realism, the author explores how humor and “laughing culture” can transform a restrictive sign into a decorative element.

The study is based on field materials collected in the Philippines between 1995 and 2026, as well as materials from a 2025 trip to Indonesia with the Russian Geographical Society. This work contributes to urban anthropology by showing how prohibitive texts become tools of private discourse in spaces otherwise dominated by the language of authority.

In the literature on mobile methods, pedestrian interviews and everyday driving practices are discussed far more often than automobile (in-car) interviewing. Ten

years of experience using mobile methods to study small-town spaces provides the basis for summarizing observations. This article examines two significant differences between automobile interviews and walking tours, relating to the image of space and the degree of detail it conveys. Various types of automobile interviews are described, depending on who drives (researcher or informant), the number of participants, and the planning of the trip. The primary advantage of automobile interviews is the ability to reach remote areas of the city that are only alluded to during walking tours. Automobile interviews help expand the pool of informants by including people engaged in everyday driving and possessing a unique perspective on the city and its transport infrastructure. Spontaneous encounters and conversations, for example with taxi drivers, can yield comments that fall outside the socially accepted canon. The limitations of automobile interviews are presented: less detail and limited channels for perceiving urban space from a car, a reduced ability of the informant to integrate narration with the movement of the trip, and the sensitivity of certain topics. At the same time, the greater intimacy of the space, the need for basic trust as a characteristic of a shared sense of “passengers in the same boat” in a car, and the different, more complex and less regulated distribution of roles in the car between interviewers and informants, driver and passengers, allow for some additional insight into the structure of the community, facilitate discussion of complex topics, and create an additional research space through the use of automobility. Particular attention is paid to the experience of the driver-researcher.

This article examines a case in which the creation of a street art piece became a way to engage residents in the development of a public space improvement project as part of the preparation of an application for the All-Russian Competition for the Best Projects for Creating a Comfortable Urban Environment in Small Towns and Historic Settlements (MGIP). The material draws on the experience of preparing a competitive application for the improvement of a section of the Guslitsa River embankment in Yegoryevsk, Moscow Region, in 2025, as well as related event formats aimed at engaging citizens in discussions of the area and design solutions. Although in the early stages, the project team viewed the street art and graffiti, abundant on buildings and fences along the embankment, as something to be painted over, the process led to the development of an alternative approach: treating graffiti and street art as a relevant cultural phenomenon and an urban resource with which it is possible to develop appropriate, non-prohibitive practices of interaction, as well as using it as a pretext for joint action and public discussion of future transformations of the area. In addition to describing Yegoryevsk's cultural landscape and a detailed reconstruction of the mechanics of engagement (an open art lab, collective development of a sketch and creation of the mural, and a festival timed to coincide with the submission of the application), the author analyzes the preconditions that made this scenario possible and assesses the case's impact — at the level of the competition application, the city's cultural infrastructure, and the participants' experiences.

The article examines the experience of creating the audio guide Yalguba: The Connection of Times, designed to preserve and present the local cultural text of a Karelian village. The project is grounded in an emic approach and seeks to “give voice” to the village through residents’ memories embedded in physical space. The authors describe the methodology of “memory routing”, understood as the identification of significant places and oral toponyms through archival research, mental maps, go-along interviews, and active community engagement on social media. As a result, two tour routes (short and extended) were developed, incorporating narratives of local history, everyday life, and both sacred and mundane practices. The project’s theoretical focus shifted from the idea of documenting a single local text to the analysis of its multiple versions, associated with different socio-age groups of residents, including long-term inhabitants, seasonal residents, and migrants. The article addresses broader questions concerning the ethics of memory research, the construction of heritage, and the potential of such projects to foster internal community consolidation and dialogue with external audiences.

A review of: Korandei, F. (Ed.). (2025). Provocative Landscapes: The Urban Peripheries of the Urals and Trans-Urals. Moscow: New Literary Observer

The present essay is devoted to the formulation and analytical interpretation of the phenomenon of “therapeutic urbanism” as a specific method of engaging with the post- Soviet urban environment. The focus of the study is not on individual artistic practices, but on a constellation of scholarly, spatial, architectural, and symbolic approaches aimed at addressing collective trauma, the loss of identity, and the absence of emotional bonds between individuals and place. In the first part of the essay, I clarify a number of concepts related to trends in street art and emphasize the importance of an integrated approach to the development of public art programs, which directly influence the formation of emotionally rich urban environments. Therapeutic urbanism is approached here as a philosophical and methodological category that enables the analysis of processes transforming the urban fabric. Its relationship to existing urban theories is examined, including concepts of reasonable urbanism, the right to the city, and semiotic analyses of urban space.

In the second part, therapeutic urbanism is explored through the case of the long-

term program Tales of Golden Apples (Almetyevsk, 2017–2023), which is understood as a laboratory for the development and testing of this method. Drawing on spatial design practices, folklore-anthropological and ethnobotanical research, participatory frameworks, and the institutional consolidation of outcomes, the essay demonstrates how the urban environment can function as a space of symbolic “healing.” This occurs through the replacement of traumatizing sign systems, the restoration of connections to local history and natural contexts, and the formation of sustainable communities. Particular attention is paid to working with “non-ideal” environments, rejecting tabula rasa approaches, and recognizing conflictual and painful reactions from residents as an integral part of the collective process of working through trauma. As a result, the article for the first time formulates the key principles of therapeutic urbanism as an interdisciplinary method for long-term urban development and for the formation of sustainable emotional and social ties.

This article presents an ethnographic study of street art in a residential building in the provincial town of Pereslavl-Zalessky, based on the author’s participant observation. The study proposes an expanded understanding of street art, encompassing not only graffiti in entrance halls but also living art objects, such as stray animals fed by residents, folk flower beds, and homemade sculptures in courtyards. The empirical material consists of graffiti found in an apartment building — a former Soviet family dormitory — where the lack of funding for repainting created conditions for observing a long-term, resident-generated visual “chronicle.” The article analyzes the content, style, and functions of entrance hall graffiti, which reflect residents’ aspirations, love letters, and philosophical statements. The study is situated within the author’s concept of sustainable territorial development through the harmonization of natural and cultural heritage, in which street art is interpreted as a manifestation of the genius loci. It is shown that grassroots folk art produces a space of harmony between nature and culture, operating at a level beyond standardized official urban design and forming an ecosystem of creative neighborliness and biospheric art therapy. The article also reveals a connection between local practices of decorating living spaces, a cosmic worldview (as expressed in the graffiti “You are my cosmos”), and the traditional Russian cultural code of hospitality and kindness.

Congratulations to S. Yu. Neklyudov on his anniversary.