PhD defence: Laima Nomeikaite

Title of the thesis: Street art, heritage and more-than-representational approaches

Summary

In recent years, street art has become increasingly acknowledged as cultural heritage. However, conventional artefact and value-based heritage approaches do not provide theoretical and practical guidance for the heritage conceptualisation or conservation of street art. In response, this article-based PhD thesis applies an alternative analytical framework comprised of more-than-representational (i.e. performative, affective, eventual, improvisational/practice-based) approaches, to increase our theoretical and practical knowledge of the ‘heritagisation’ of street art.
Using the more-than-representational framework, the thesis addresses diverse heritagisation aspects of street art, such as power, social inequalities, affective resistance, heritage conservation and social and political aspects of the heritage experience of street art and urban atmospheres.
The thesis makes contribution and innovation on several levels.

• First, it represents the first exploration of the relationship between street art, heritage and more-than-representational theory within street art, heritage and urban studies.
• Second, it develops a hybrid more-than-representational framework integrating authorized heritage/aesthetics and commons heritage/counter-aesthetics and, in this way, embraces the dialectic between the representational and the non-representational within heritage experiences and social life.
• Third, it introduces a new concept of ‘evental heritage’ for the study and understanding of street art heritagisation as a dynamic, future-oriented force for material and socio-political change.
• Fourth, its affective and performative understanding of citizen’s views on art/urban art heritage enhances democratic heritage and urban governance.
• Finally, it introduces an improvisational and performative heritage methodological approach for researching street/urban art, heritage and urban space.