Similar to public monuments, (the artistic / collective) street intervention acts as a vehicle for cultural meaning and collective memory. Such civic compositions, by their very presence, become, as urbanist Christine Boyer put it, “rhetorical topoi.”[1] However, if a monument is conceived and built to mark an event or a personality its fate is often marked by invisibility and indifference. Instead, participatory street art, precisely because its participatory and ephemeral character, is subject to a different dialectic of memory and oblivion.

The monument seems incapable of “presentifying” itself, despite the actions which at times are dedicated to it, such as ceremonies or commemorations of the monumentalized person or event.

To presentify means, on the one hand, to be present as a reminder, to remain current, to reiterate the message carried by the monument, and, on the other hand, to be present in an active sense, that is, to remain open to interaction, to make itself, in fact, visible. In contrast, participatory street art is in its essence “presentifible”, although it has the drawback of being ephemeral and, as such, unforgiving with its own legacy or history. Thus, we can speculate that, in this process, the Latin oblitare (= oblivion) is contaminated by another Latin term, obliterare (to obliterate, to make invisible).

Interventionist actions have the capacity to reinclude street art in the flow of collective memory through a discourse that is always current and updateable. Activating the memory of a piece of street art through participation ultimately leads to a paradoxical result: the artistic intervention becomes a platform of anti-memory. By the latter I mean critical memory, memory that works not by accumulation but by interpretation, by reconversion and reformulation. The artwork thus renewed becomes not so much the opposite of the original piece, but rather its alternative, a different possibility of controlling the memory attached to the represented symbols.

As a hypostasis of anti-memory, participatory street art can ultimately become a counter-monument. That is, an object-place that demonstrates anti-monumental strategies, contrary to the traditional monument, in terms of its appearance as an artistic object, the message it conveys and its “duration”. The counter-monument alters the codes of memory as they were originally formulated, proposing instead an alternative and/or critical discourse on the identity of the monument, but also on the political discourse applied to that object and place. Thus, the counter-monument can be seen as the most obvious proof that, as Jacques Rancière has emphasized, “art contains within itself the virtue of resistance.”[2] And collective diversion, it must be said, is essentially an artistic act that succeeds in making street art a place of reflection and debate, equally permanent and transitory, evocative and participatory.

Horea Avram is an art critic, media theorist and independent curator. He researches and writes about art and visual culture in relationship with media technology. Associate Professor at the Department of Cinema and Media, Faculty of Theatre and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He has contributed to: Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, (Oxford University Press, 2014), Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline (New York: Routledge, 2013), Encyclopedia of the imaginaries in Romania. (Iași: Polirom, 2020).

Books: Ex machina. Art, Media and Technology (in preparation, Cluj University Press, 2025); ORLAN. Les films des Sainte-Orlan. (Cluj-Napoca: Intact Cultural Foundation, 2022. Co-editor with F. Ștefan); The Negotiable Perspective. Essays and Commentaries on Contemporary Artistic Practices (Cluj: Eikon, 2021); Moving Images, Mobile Bodies. The Poetics and Practice of Corporeality in Visual and Performing Arts (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018 - editor).

He was curator for Romania at the Venice Biennale, 1999. President of AICA-Romania (International Association of Art Critics 2020-2026).