Research on (verbo-)pictorial metaphors and other rhetorical figures is primarily focused on the genre of advertising, leaving other genres under-investigated. In this study, the authors focus on ...street art, a visually perceived cross-cultural medium used to address sociopolitical issues. This genre typically combines two interacting semiotic systems – language and depiction – and is thus a form of polysemiotic communication. Their analysis is based on a corpus of 50 street artworks addressing the financial, sociopolitical and migrant/refugee crisis in the city of Athens (2015–2017). They present a data-driven procedure for the identification and interpretation of metaphors and other rhetorical figures in street art, informed by cognitive linguistic and semiotic models.
Quantitative analyses show that their models can be reliably applied to street art and can enable them to distinguish metaphors from other rhetorical figures within these images. At the same time, qualitative analyses show that this genre usually requires the integration of conceptual, contextual, socio-cultural and linguistic knowledge in order to achieve successful interpretation of these images. The authors discuss their findings within the theoretical framework of cognitive semiotics.
In line with cognitive semiotics, this paper suggests a synthetic account of the important but controversial notion of narrative (in street art, and more generally): one that distinguishes between ...three levels: (a) narration, (b) underlying story, and (c) frame-setting. The narrative potential of street art has not yet been considerably studied in order to offer insights into how underlying stories may be reconstructed from the audience and how different semiotic systems contribute to this. The analysis is mainly based on three contemporary street artworks and two political cartoons from the 1940s, involving the same frame-setting, which may be labeled as “Greece vs. Powerful Enemy.” The study is built on fieldwork research that was carried out during several periods in central Athens since 2014. The qualitative analyses with the help of insights from phenomenology show that single static images do not narrate stories themselves (primary narrativity), but rather presuppose such stories, which they can prompt or trigger (secondary narrativity). Notably, the significance of sedimented socio-cultural experience, collective memory and contextual knowledge that the audience must recruit in order to reconstruct the narrative potential through the process of secondary narrativity is stressed.
Author BiographyGeorgios Stampoulidis, Centre for Language and Literature, Division for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University, Sweden
Georgios Stampoulidis is a PhD candidate at the Division for Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University. His research interests are in the fields of polysemiotic communication and multimodality, narrative and metaphor, and urban creativity. His work focuses on street art as a cross-cultural medium of meaning-making, cultural production and political intervention in urban space, and thus, he has previously conducted fieldwork in Athens, Greece. His most recent publications are “A Cognitive Semiotic Exploration of Metaphors in Greek Street Art” (Cognitive Semiotics, 2019) and “Urban Creativity in Abandoned Places. Xenia Hotels Project, Greece” (Nuart Journal, 2019). Currently, he is research fellow at Urban Creativity Lund and Scandinavian Metaphor networks.
Multimodality is in fact a polysemous word, which is tightly related to the notions of modality, and (semiotic) mode and is used in conceptually different ways across different disciplines (for a ...review see Adami, 2016; Devylder, 2019; Green, 2014). As cognitive semiotics (Zlatev et al., 2016) aims to integrate concepts and methods from semiotics, cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, we endeavor to offer a coherent terminology, in line with the proposals of Green (2014), Stampoulidis et al. (2019) and Zlatev (2019), which distinguishes the notions of perceptual (sensory) modalities (sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste) and semiotic systems (language, depiction and gesture).For example, using this polysemiotic/multimodal distinction would allow us to describe the work of street art displayed in Figure 1 consisting of verbal text (language) and pictorial elements (depiction) as clearly a form of polysemiotic communication, instantiated in the particular socio-cultural medium of street art, whereas the street artwork displayed in Figure 2 might be considered as an example of unisemiotic communication (only the semiotic system of depiction is present). Nevertheless, both artworks may be considered monomodal since at least one perceptual modality is involved: sight. On the other hand, artworks such as these displayed in Figure 3 and Figure 4 can be both polysemiotic and unisemiotic, respectively, and (potentially) multimodal (if) they trigger multiple senses in the viewer, such as sight and touch, for example. It is important to note that the terminological distinction and conceptual dichotomy between the semiotic systems of language and depiction are not always clear-cut, especially in the case of street art (and graffiti), as has been argued in a certain literature (Bal, 1991; Neef, 2007). Therefore, we would like to stress that street art is typically a form of polysemiotic communication, and thus, we restrict the term unisemiotic either to the case of primarily depiction-dominant or primarily language- dominant graphic representations. In our study on street art, marking this polysemiotic/ multimodal distinction – terminological and conceptual – would help us toward a synthetic analysis of the interaction between language and depiction, and that of language, depiction, vision, and (potentially) smelling, touching or even hearing, into a whole communicative situation.
The Athenian graffiti functions as a testament of creativity and artistry occurring during the hard times of socioeconomic and political crisis in Greece the last seven years. The impact of Greece's ...crisis is unavoidably presented through urban art in downtown Athens. This extensive street art practice on Athenian walls as a linguistic and imagery line is approached in this work via the semiotic and multimodal perspective, as the main symbolic and representative expression generated by the crisis, contributing to the production of visual urban culture. Fieldwork research was conducted in Athens from January to July 2015. The findings of the qualitative analysis highlight that politicized wall writings constitute a modern wall language, expressing social and political messages produced mainly via text and image, reconstructing the wall slogans and murals as the fundamental means of sociopolitical reaction.
The Athenian graffiti functions as a testament of creativity and artistry occurring during the hard times of socioeconomic and political crisis in Greece the last seven years. The impact of Greece's ...crisis is unavoidably presented through urban art in downtown Athens. This extensive street art practice on Athenian walls as a linguistic and imagery line is approached in this work via the semiotic and multimodal perspective, as the main symbolic and representative expression generated by the crisis, contributing to the production of visual urban culture. Fieldwork research was conducted in Athens from January to July 2015. The findings of the qualitative analysis highlight that politicized wall writings constitute a modern wall language, expressing social and political messages produced mainly via text and image, reconstructing the wall slogans and murals as the fundamental means of sociopolitical reaction.
The campus of the National Metsovian Polytechnic in central Athens has been a signi cant cornerstone in the socio-political landscape of the city. Within the history of modern Greece, Polytechneio is ...regarded as a symbol of resistance against the Greek military dictatorship (junta) in 1973. In March 2015 and during times of austerity politics, the west façades of the Polytechneio were covered by a “black-and-white mural” (Tziovas 2017: 45). This paper examines how and why this black-and-white mural has been discussed often controversially from di erent kinds of recipients, leading to an ardent public debate within Greek society from a cross disciplinary point of view: 1) semiotics, 2) design, and 3) cultural studies. For our analysis, we use data from primary and secondary sources. Primary data sources include photographic documentation of the eld. Secondary data sources include photographic material and newspaper articles circulated online, as well as, relevant academic literature.First, we examine how this mural was integrated into the constructions and intersubjective experiences of public space from the perspective of semiotization of space. Second, we discuss the practicalities involved for the ful lment of this mural from the perspective of design-scope. And third, we advance the discussion around the issues of cultural preservation and heritagization of street art and gra ti. Our goal in this paper is to avoid binary interpretations, and instead, to induce in an intermediary way the signi cance of public dialogue, which this mural achieved to trigger.
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