A photoblog with pictures I've taken of graffiti and street art in Moscow (and anywhere else I happen to travel).

Monday, August 01, 2005

St. Petersburg stencil graf

Here are some of the better stencils I saw on my trip to St. Petersburg during the first week of July. I don't have date/time/location information for most of them, so in lieu of that I'll just provide what little captioning I can. This first one was on a booth selling tickets for a canal boat ride and was located on the Fontanka embankment (or perhaps Moika).
My memory is failing me, and since I'm posting this from far from home (from Chisinau, Moldova) I don't have my usual recourse to the date/time stamp or the ability to look at the photos in the context of the ones taken immediately before or after, which is usually how I identify where things happened.


Translation from the Russian: "How much [time] do you have left?" This photo's from a building on the embankment of the same canal as the one above.


Are you ready? This one is from Dumskaya Ulitsa.


There are plenty of mosquitoes in SPB in the summer...

From Dumskaya Ulitsa or thereabouts. No idea who this is supposed to be. Perhaps Viktor Tsoi? Tsoi was a Russian rock star (lead singer of the band "Kino") of the 1980's who died tragically in 1990 and is featured in graffiti all across the former Soviet Union. The most common phrase, which I've seen in both Chisinau and Tashkent, not to mention all over Moscow and St. Petersburg, is "Tsoi zhiv," or "Tsoi lives." But this stencil is probably supposed to be someone else.
This stencl "artist" didn't try too hard - this appears to be the Russian-alphabet stencil that was standard issue to all Soviet schoolchildren. I am pretty sure I have one of these in storage...

The mark of ДСПА (DSPA), Dvizhenie Soprotivleniia imeni Petra Alekseeva (the Pyotr Alekseev Opposition Movement), a group which has hung Putin in effigy and hung banners with messages rude to the Russian commander-in-chief - no wonder their website, dspa.spb.ru, indexed just six weeks ago by Rambler, can no longer be found at the same URL.

[Update 11/13/05 - thanks to "anonymous" from DSPA for commenting and cluing me in to their new website: dspa.info]


It's unclear what "Louis & urban fathers" have to do with the prominent hemp leaf on their stencil. Dealers? Consumers? One of the mysteries of graf... Above the stencil is the tag of T-Albert, ubiquitous in St. Petersburg.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

T-Albert!!! I love it, this cat has just as much style(if not more) than all the rest of the writers in developing countries put together. Veritable anomoly.

Thanks for the flicks, you get my first ever comment on a blog.

1:02 AM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, we are sorry, that you are don't know, that our old website (dspa.spb.ru) was closed by the administration of the host-provider "Nevahost". Now our site's address is http://dspa.info
Wellcome!
Best regards,
DSPA.

6:16 AM

 
Blogger Scraps of Moscow said...

Thanks for pointing this out - I've updated the post with the new link.

9:56 PM

 

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