The geosemiotics of ethno-political graffiti in Kosovo: polyphony, emplacement and heteroglossia

ABSTRACT

This article examines the nature of graffiti semiotics in the public space of Kosovo’s capital Pristina. By adopting a perspective on graffiti as a historically situated and semiotic practice, we identify distinct ethno-political voices, each relying on highly multimodal-linguistic resources to convey their respective political messages to a wider audience. The corpus was gathered during a specific period in Kosovo’s history (2013-2014) and as such allows us to capture the idiosyncratic nature of the encountered graffiti as a phenomenon which emerges as a non-transgressively emplaced and dynamically constructed medium allowing conflicting views on the political future of Kosovo to enter in dialogue with one another for everyone to see in the public heart of the capital. Moreover, the dynamic nature of graffiti inscriptions in the Kosovo capital makes it a conversationally layered, inherently heteroglossic speech act with several dissenting authors at work. Our fieldwork and analysis contribute not only to insights in the nature of graffiti as a political medium but also to our understanding of the phenomenology of ethno-political graffiti in Kosovo, the complexities of which can only be appreciated against the history of both the country as a contested geographical entity, and the Balkan region at large.

KEYWORDS:

• Kosovo
• graffiti
• polyphony
• transgressivity
• heteroglossia
• emplacement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The concept of ethnic community as used in this study borrows from the definitions of Gellner (1989) and Detrez (1996, 17), who describe it in terms of “a group of people with a common language, religion, moral and social values through which the members consider themselves as a community” (translation from Dutch). By extension, the ethnic language is the linguistic dimension of identification with the ethnic community, and thus the mother tongue spoken by that community.

2 Our understanding of the term “graffscape”, following Pennycook (2010), in Pristina encompasses the combination of graffiti inscriptions (including various graffiti pieces, tags, murals and other forms of graffiti coexisting within a region). As such, it extends beyond individual graffiti inscriptions, and encompasses the collective presence of graffiti within the semiotic construction of Pristina’s public space.

3 We understand graffiti “mash-ups” here as layered spraypaintings that convey the message through the use of different semiotic modes (text, image) and expressive styles (various fonts, and colors).

4 See “Newborn Love” on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC4e7gO7DTc&feature=youtu.be (accessed 12.12.2014).

5 See https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/newborn-sign-kosovo-independence.html