INFILTRI is a street art project, platform and crowd-sourcing website – archive of street art in Europe and the Middle East.
The main focus of the project is to document and discuss the social and political context of self-expression in public space via street art, triggered after and around the Arab Spring.
Seeing street art as reaction to critical and ongoing social issues, the aim of the project is to document the creation of contemporary history, providing street artists secured visibility, allowing public/website users to have a broad insight into the street art tendencies and initiatives in Euro-Mena region, and sharing the material that researchers (academics, journalists, activists) can use for future analysis and articulation.
Infiltri operates both online and offline, through search and research trips, documenting street art, walking conferences, project presentations, mobile and site-specific exhibitions, public art interventions, the website and archive serving as a forum for street art professionals and fans.
The project is a collaboration between Annalisa Cannito, Caram Kapp, Srdjan Tunic, Zeyad Salem, Don Karl aka Stone, Tomasz Mloduchovski, Daniel Peslari and Azra Causevici.
Walking Tour with Rana Jaribou (Beirut, 2013). Photo by Annalisa Cannito
CONTEXT
Iconic moments and figures from history are part of the collective memory, seeping into it through depictions, tales and transmissions. Iconic moments are a constant reminder of the changes that we live through as a race, individually and together. Not all have witnessed such moments first hand and even fewer get to write of them for future reference. This raises the question of who is writing ours, where and how?
What about those living through it, how do they to document and tell their own stories? What means do their surroundings allow them? Are those stories relevant as the preface to the first draft of history?
The wave of revolutions in the Arab world has led to a creative release – encouraging and pushing many in search of self-expression through the arts. This has promoted the emergence of a vivid street and urban art scene in the Arab region. In a cultural landscape that has yet to catch up with this development, yet provides unlimited, ever-changing sources of how things are, it is a reflection of the social dynamics and currents in the region on all levels.
Infiltri begins a web movement: a website based on crowd sourcing where all forms of street art are shared by users from the around Europe and the Middle East. Uploaded, written and commented on by them. A way for the people to document even the seemingly most trivial expressions of social and political transformation in their areas. A first reflection on contemporary events as described through art.
Side by side with documentation from other countries, archiving extends into a comparison – forms of self expression across the Euro Mena region based on quality, techniques and social impact with respect to the different socio-political dynamics taking place in the region, in an open- access online location.
The website is the first step in this movement that will be accompanied by walking conferences, performances and workshops carried out on both sides of the Mediterranean: http://infiltri.org/
An on-ground aspect to the online network will be formed between artists, journalists, writers, curators and sociologists examining the relevance and perception of street art as a grass-roots medium for political communication and monitoring the transformations taking place across different nations and countries. They will present their results and research in talks, mini-exhibition, contextual walks or interventions, whether in public spaces or galleries.
In addition to being online and onground, Infliltri is also going to be on paper, showcasing an compiling the most relevant website content in publications of various disciplines and tackling the online archives from different sociocultural angles in print.