KCP ENG 3
15 x 10 cm
Not For Sale
In 2000, President Milošević was overthrown and a long and painful process of democratisation in Serbia officially started. Borders were slowly opening, and artists started moving to and from Serbia. When it comes to graffiti culture, this transition took place a little bit earlier. In 1999, Serbia endured a three-month bombing campaign conducted by NATO; however, in the same year, the first graffiti jam was organised in Belgrade. This event meant that local graffiti writers, for the first time, received nozzles with different performances (fat cap, skinny cap) and they officially started collaborating with artists from Croatia and Slovenia, and even some from the rest of Europe. This is not to say that there had not been collaborations and visits from the artists from the former Yugoslav republics earlier, but for the first time, this was acknowledged officially. In graffiti culture, artists are supra-national: they function along the lines of ‘being a good graffiti writer or not’. This period of regeneration on our graffiti scene lasted until 2003 when the first democratic prime minister Zoran Djindjić was assassinated. For many different reasons, the local graffiti scene was toned down, almost to non-existence, but at the end of 2004, we started to see a small, monochrome stencil of Amélie Poulain. At the time, a 16-year-old girl who called herself TKV (The Kraljica Vila or The Fairy Queen) had come back from a visit to Rome, where she saw the stencils of Sten and Lex, and she decided to bring into public space one of her favourite movie characters. And though the oldest graffiti in Belgrade was done with the stencil technique in the 1920s, that was political graffiti. The TKV small intervention started a street art movement in Belgrade. It is interesting to see that another French movie played a significant role in the development of Belgrade graffiti and street art scenes. Stencil technique has been present in art for a very long time but the biggest influence it had in Europe was due to the stencil movement in Paris in the 1980s. Hip-hop culture was gaining popularity in Europe rapidly and graffiti culture was already present in most of the big European cities, where it met the traditional art forms that were executed in the public space. One of these interventions in public space was done using a stencil technique. This amalgamation and cross-pollination of the graffiti culture that came from the USA with the artistic practices and techniques in Europe led, eventually, to the artistic expression we call street art. Some of the forefathers of street art in Europe came from France. We are referring to artists such as Blek Le Rat, Space Invader and Mr. Andre. All of these had a significant influence on Belgrade and, consequently, the Serbian scene. When they were creating their first artworks on the streets, they were part of graffiti culture, even though the concept of what we view as street art now did not exist. In reality, they were the forebearers of the new conceptual art in the streets that was born from graffiti culture but represented a different visual expression. At the beginning of the new millennium, different cultural institutions took over the role of transmitters of graffiti and street art trends. And during this period, most of the trends were moving in one direction: from Europe to Serbia.