F*** Gays / Homophobia! Queering Street Art & the Adventures of Inspector Yoda the Wrinkled (Ljubljana Street Art festival, 2022)

LJSAF 2022

About the festival (27.6. – 3.7):

Ljubljana awakens in colors again. The fourth edition of the Ljubljana Street Art Festival (LJSAF) returns to the streets, galleries, Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture and other hidden and less hidden corners of the city. This year’s festival program includes both local as well as international artists and speakers. The week-long festivity remains faithful to its mission: to read the streets and familiarize all generations with the visual and theoretical aspects of this urban phenomenon. LJSAF includes a series of colorful events such as guided tours, workshops, concerts, a conference and the reopening of the largest gallery in the city – Ljubljana’s streets.

From the conference description:

The conference program, as well as the central theme of the festival, shifts from the city to the periphery. The Periphery of Street Art conference will feature more than 20 presentations dealing with marginal street art practices in synergy with other and/or different conceptual approaches and body politics. On the one hand, the conference will focus on the urban peripheries of street art and activist practices in the appropriation and marking of public space. On the other hand, we want to pay attention to street art on the periphery, for example in the field of queer and feminist street art, the transformation of street art into performative expressions, new media and intermedial formats such as AR, laser or NFT “graffiti”.

Presentation:

F*** Gays Homophobia! Queering Street Art & the Adventures of Inspector Yoda the Wrinkled

Between 2013 and 2018, a little stenciled pug was popping up in the streets of Belgrade, Serbia. In its short and productive artivist career, the pug called Inspector Yoda the Wrinkled (Inspektor Yoda Zgužvani) communicated almost 200 distinct messages to passersby. Ranging from anti-hate and social commentary, across pro-trans and queer, to everyday sayings, in these messages the street art character playfully appropriated common speech, often subverting or queering the content/language. Apart from personal creative expression, Inspector Yoda the Wrinkled’s messages also offered important gender and social critique in public space, and tackle a wider significance of political or activist street art, especially in a country were queer art in general is not that frequent, nor public.

Despite a notable presence and original style, Inspector Yoda the Wrinkled’s opus has not been properly analyzed as a whole. Additionally, his pieces are disappearing due to the ephemeral nature of street art and the fact the artist is not active since 2020. Considering all of the above, my aim is to understand how queer artivism operates in the streets of Belgrade during 2010s to encourage the readers to pay attention to and understand the importance of marginalized voices in the street/public spaces. These voices can serve as powerful critical reflections of our society, a playful and creative tool to symbolically subvert and condemn violence and right-wing extremism. To achieve this, I am combining queer as a theory (especially queer space) and street art as a field, supported by LGBTQ+ activist publications, global queer street art discussions, and interviews with the author.

The presentation can be accessed here (from 43:00):

For more info, see:

Ljubljana Street Art Festival

Inspektor Yoda Zgužvani: FB, IG, IG (en)

For MA thesis on the subject, click here; article published for SAUC, here.