Buffing – the practice of painting geometric shapes over graffiti, street art and random wall inscriptions – is a familiar phenomenon in many cities across the globe. However, Moscow’s authorities and public maintenance workers’ obsession with the cleanliness and sterility of the urban environment has made Moscow the capital of buffing, and buffing, in turn, the calling card of the capital's street art. Practitioners and theorists of street art have long regarded buffing as a new subgenre of street art, aesthetically close to abstract painting, and in essence ‘outsider’ art in this case – that of caretakers and public maintenance workers, which makes buffing related to another popular trend in Russia – ZhKKh art.
Moscow artists Volodimer and Maxim Ajer have once again decided to spotlight this urban phenomenon in their new project Privatisation, where they ‘privatise’ fragments of city walls, transplanting them to the gallery space. Volodimer comments, ‘For many years, Moscow’s buffing on the walls could only be documented. But with the mass emergence of trompe l’oeil building wraps in the city centre, we got the chance to “privatise” this phenomenon.’ The artists note that graffiti and street art are essentially associated with the idea of ​​privatisation, the appropriation of someone else’s or public property. If a modernist or capitalist city belongs to anyone, it is to those with wealth and power. Yet teenagers could also assert their right to urban space, to stake their claim to it for themselves and their friends with the help of graffiti.
Buffing, or graffiti destruction, is the reaction of city authorities to some citizens’ or groups’ attempts to declare ownership over supposedly public (but in fact controlled) unowned spaces. Moscow authorities focus on bringing the city space to a single common denominator in terms of logic and style, on unifying, prohibiting and painting over graffiti, ads, and any displays of humanity. However, life manifests itself everywhere – in details, nuances, shapes, and shades of buffing.
Street artists, unable to compete with the juggernaut destroying their creative output, constantly develop new ways of interacting with the urban environment, new ways of privatising unowned (authoritarian) city space. This time they refuse to create something new, conversely, they privatise the results and documentary evidence of the struggle against them, cutting holes in the multi-layered false facade that overlays the living, crumbling city, covered with street art and painted over with new layers of censorship.
By privatising these layers of struggle and interaction between the excluded citizen groups (non-institutional artists and migrant workers) they attempt to take the next step in the continuing fight for the city, and also record this fight, transferring it to a stretcher and placing it in a relatively safe, private (gallery) space.

Anton Polsky (Make)

Volodimer (b. 1988, Moscow) is a multidisciplinary street artist. He makes works at the intersection of metagraffiti, mockumentary, postbuffing, art doc, asemic writing, graffiti archaeology. Directed Don’t Look a Gift Horse In the Mouth (2012), the first urban art film in the post-Soviet space featuring Kirill Kto. Books: The Whole Metro Train (2016), The Whole-train Metro (2022), Stolichnaya Letters (2022), published by the V Stol publishing house.

Selected shows
2024 Imagine You Are a Human, A-Ya Gallery, St Petersburg
2023 NORMCORE, ROSPHOTO, St Petersburg
2021 Splendour and Misery, 10.203, St Petersburg
Natural Thermoplastic, Not Found Gallery, Moscow
Open Mic, OKTAVA, Tula
2019 STRICTLY DEMO 016, Street Art Museum, St Petersburg
2015 Triangle, Triangle Gallery, Moscow
Urban Intelligence, Moscow Urban Forum, Manege Central Exhibition Hall, Moscow
2014 City of Others, Moscow Urban Forum, Manege Central Exhibition Hall, Moscow
2012 Sobyanin, Baby, Come On!, Moscow

Maxim Ajer (b. 1986, Magdeburg, Germany) is a street artist. He started painting in 2001, and has been working in different countries since. He creates uncoordinated works on publicly accessible surfaces.