Russia's Banksy does it for the motherland

Russian street artist P183 is covering Moscow with his politically charged murals – and says he's doing it for a 'strong, educated and cultured homeland'

A mural in Moscow by the Russian street artist known as P183. Photograph: P183/Rex Features

Decorating the walls of Moscow with politically fuelled graffiti isn't met with quite the same admiration as it is in the UK, yet an artist known only as P183 has made a name for himself by capturing the zeitgeist of modern-day Russia in his work.

P183's portfolio includes a sprawling mural of a masked protester holding a flare, a CCTV camera fitted with machine guns and a cardboard cut-out of a young girl hanging baubles on a barbed-wire fence. After gaining notoriety when photographs of his art got picked up around the world, he is now preparing a new series that will be unveiled around the Moscow streets soon.

Dubbed the Russian Banksy, or "Bankski", his art resembles the world's best-known street artist, although P183 insists he has never tried to imitate the Bristolian. Speaking from Moscow over Skype, dressed in his usual black garb and balaclava, he says: "I fully understand that we both have a common cause, but I never sought to emulate him or anyone else. I use the songs of people such as Yegor Letov and Konstantin Kinchev for inspiration – not public figures."

P183 first began writing poems at the age of 11 on the Tsoi Wall in Moscow, which pays tribute to Soviet musician Viktor Tsoi. Then as he got older, he began to spray murals elsewhere in the city. Lately he has set up guerrilla installations, including a giant fork shovelling industrial piping that looks like a plate of spaghetti.

As with most street artists, P183's canvas is all too soon covered with grey paint by the authorities. "The city government is categorically against street art, so any wall drawings are painted over. Graffiti with political meaning and social subtext are painted over especially fast," he says.

At the mere mention of this week's Russian election, he scowls. "I'm not going to talk about Putin, it's too much. In our country, there is a very heavy atmosphere. People are closed-minded, and money is the most important thing. Our state does not support creativity. To me, street art is a tool to send thoughts to people."

His motivation remains "to have a strong, educated and cultured homeland". If photographers continue to get to his work before the authorities, he may help to achieve just that.

*this article is originally posted on: the guardian- SHORTCUTS BLOG; A Sideways Look at the News

The False Dichotomy Between "Work" and "Home" For Many... Part II:

Paraphrased from: Composing A Life by, Mary Catherine Bateson, copyright 1989, "A radical rethinking the concept of achievement." -San Francisco Chronical

From my first posting, in September 2009, directly quoting from Mary Catherine Bateson's work, "Composing A Life":    

     "As I began to thing about the lives of women in this project, I was struck by the diversity of their homes and the spaces they created to live and work, by these concrete expressions of who we are. Joan is the only one of us who has spent long periods of her life as a traditional full-time homemaker. I have visited the Eriksons in at least half a dozen of their houses across the country. Joan talks about the sense of light and openness she tries to achieve for Erik, and I recognize familiar brightly colored pieces of art and handicraft from one house to the next, but they are always artfully recombined, each object at rest in its new place. Of all of us, Joan has the clearest understanding of how objects that enrich the senses can also enrich human relationships.
    
     It is possible to create a context of sharing with very simple material cues. This idea is best expressed by the old notion of sacrament. This word has been shaped and often abused by the Christian tradition, but it is still useful express an idea that occurs in many cultures: that the most ordinary materials. like bread and clay, as well as those that are rare and shining, are carriers of meaning, and that the proper action taken with these materials, around the day of the calendar, have a transformative value. The old Anglican catechism defined a sacrament as "an outward and visual sign of an inward and spiritual grace." I prefer the statement that turns up in some Catholic theological discussions: "a sacrament effects what it signifies." *The lighting of Sabbath candles, the giving of gifts, the preparation and sharing of food_ all have the potential to bring about human closeness, as well as simply referring to it.                                  

     When my husband and I visited his family in Beirut on our honeymoon I was frustrated to find that my courteous and highly educated in-laws answered me in English whenever I spoke to them in Armenian. Then, on the fourth or fifth day of our visit, his mother set out to make chee kufta, a dish in which finely ground lean lamb is kneaded at length with bulgar wheat, parsley, and onions until the raw meat simply disappears into the wheat. It's one of those dishes, shaped by their mother's hands. that sons go home to eat. Greatly daring, I went into the kitchen and took over the kneading. After that day, my in-laws began to answer me in Armenian, the kneading of meat and grain and the sharing of what I had prepared having transformed me into a different person, just as the mother of a new priest is suddenly shy with her son after he has been touched with sacred oils, just as desire becomes holy after the exchange of wedding rings. 

*Enchiridion Symbolorum: Definitions et rationum de rebus civii et morum, 33rd edition, ed. H. Denzinger. Freiburg: Herder, 1965. Nos. 1606, 1639. 

Only 7 more pages, after transcribing 12. 5 pages... to be continued. It won't be as long as 2.5 years.