Slinkachu's micro-urban landscape : the british tradition in global street art installation

Conférence du séminaire "Street Art Europe" du 13 avril 2018 organisé par le Nice Street Art Project (NSAP) porté par Edwige Comoy Fusaro, tenu à l'Université Nice Sophia Antipolis.

Since 2007, British street artist Stuart Pantoll aka Slinkachu has turned London streets into miniature landscapes with his street installations. The pastoral theme of Slinkachu's work explores therelationship between London urban dwellers and an artificially recreated wild world. By placing his one-inch-high figurines in every nook and cranny of the British capital city and leaving them to their fate, Slinkachu shows that the divide between the urban and the natural worlds eventually amounts to spatial relativity and conditions of visibility. Through this vertiginous shift of perspective, the street artist wishes to promote a new underitanding of the cityscape as a possible extension of Nature and raise awareness of environmental issues- For passers-by, the random encounter with Slinkachu's "little people" is a moment of epiphany : it triggers a reflection on human condition and its survival in modern city life. First rooted ìn London, his work is anchored in British culture as defined by the rural/urban dichotomy, the English garden tradition and a social critique based on cultural relativism. Yet, it is also a universal statement that can resonate in any big city.