In this article, we enter into a conversation with Danilo Milovanović (DNLM), an artist based in Slovenia, whose practice in public space leaves behind socio-political and environmentally engaged commentaries. His interventions open up civic debate and make visible the tensions that shape contemporary urban life. Trained in the visual arts, Milovanović positions his practice outside both vandalism and conventional street art: his gestures are conceptual, self-curated and site-specific, rooted in a critical engagement with politics, the neoliberal city, planning, and civic use. Agile and ephemeral, his works bypass institutional walls while remaining in discursive exchange with the established art environment. Often, in his works, the sense of a dialogue is present, with past and contemporary guerrilla artists, who offer exchange, support and add to the legitimacy of thought and provocation.

Contesting the Neoliberal City

Urban change, whether through aggressive redevelopment or seemingly minor interventions such as tree removal, is often experienced by citizens as imposed, incremental and unaccountable. The neoliberal city’s trajectory towards privatisation has resulted in a shrinking of the public space—the very condition for exercising civic freedoms. Occupy Wall Street made this starkly visible when many of the protests unfolded in so-called POPS (privately owned public spaces). Yet, beyond such iconic moments, clues of appropriation and restriction in public space are easy to find for close observers.

Between Institutions and Subcultures

Public art, when financed through municipal budgets, becomes legitimised as part of the official narrative and branding of the city. Street art, once a non-conformist expression of culture, has itself been appropriated—municipalities commission murals while socially engaged graffiti, such as those by Banksy, are extracted from their context and absorbed into the gallery circuit. This process of appropriation is a familiar tool of urban governance: underground cultures are abstracted into the creative industries, sanitising neighbourhoods in the process of revitalisation.

Public space thus emerges as a contested stage where ideas and power are continually rehearsed and re-enforced. Surveillance technologies, design conventions, and the codes of appropriate use limit who belongs where. Hostile architecture, for example, makes exclusion tangible—benches divided to prevent lying down, spikes to deter loitering, or the absence of seating altogether.

Public Space as Collective Ground

Despite these constraints, public space remains defined by accessibility and the multiplicity of voices that inhabit it. Joseph Beuys’s concept of the social sculpture foregrounds this dynamic: in works such as 7000 Oaks, he conceived the city as a living organism shaped by collective actions and creative participation. In this sense, artivism (combining art and activism) continues Beuys’s project of rejecting institutional isolation and embedding art into civic, social and political life.

Artivism, or rather engaged art as artivism became commodified, Milovanović stresses, places commentary before aesthetics. It mobilises strategies of street art while pressing further into socio-political critique, retaining the guerrilla edge of illegality without reducing itself to vandalism. Actions are humorous or absurd, operating through exaggeration, erasure, or dislocation—mechanisms that defamiliarise the everyday and compel reflection. Crucially, these works operate in unpredictable and transient forms, outside the gallery, where institutions cannot neutralise them through framing.

Recently, Stephen Burke coined the term Post Vandalism to describe an art-making approach that merges street-inspired civil disobedience and urban intervention with contemporary art. While the phrase is catchy, the prefix post– is misleading—nothing has ended—and the word vandalism hardly reflects what these artists, in dialogue with the city, are actually pursuing. In fact, quite the opposite. What postvandalism could describe are practices that counter or reframe street art: overwriting graffiti, making subtle improvements in the city, or translating actions in public space into the gallery context.

Milovanović deploys guerrilla tactics to address the frictions of urbanisation. His refined visual language distinguishes his works from vandalism: they do not undermine the shared values of citizens, but rather act as gestures of a “public servant”, offering points of entry for participation in the ongoing co-creation of the city. His projects engage themes such as the urban–rural relationship, ecological footprint, inclusivity, and visual pollution.

Engaged art in public space unsettles the choreographed surfaces of the neoliberal city. By exposing absurdities and refusing institutional domestication, it interrupts the erosion of public space into a mere stage for commerce and control. Milovanović’s practice demonstrates that even the smallest gesture—an absurd bench, a displaced sign—can reassert the city as a space of negotiation rather than submission. If public space is where democracy is lived, these kinds of actions ensure it cannot be quietly designed away.

His methods span using ad-hoc situations that use overlooked conditions to draw attention;

Dislocation – by translocating objects or meanings to provoke estrangement;

Exaggeration and absurdity can heighten the obvious until it destabilises itself;

Erasure – rendering visible by making disappear;

But one of the most appreciated, as Milovanović mentions, is pieces of unnoticed, unspectacular art interventions. When the change is subtle to the point of hardly noticing when passing by, without an in-your-face critique, but adding the oddness in public space, which can open a door with its poetic expression.

Many of your pieces are exhibited in one form in a gallery space. How do you deal with this oxymoron?

DNLM: For me, it is important to make a distinction between guerrilla art in public space and public art. Most of my works are not commissioned, and only become exhibited post-festum. I also acknowledge the gallery space as a public space and, moreover, a kind of platform for showing your work, like Instagram. Also, the gallery for me works like a junction, where different actions performed at different times in public space take another form (video, print, sculpture, etc) and circle around a theme I am exploring that is more processual. A work that is performed in an outdoor space gets a shape in another medium, and it gets transformed under different conditions.

It amuses me to ponder how my work plays the system, which only the very system can validate and exhibiting in a public gallery further puts one in a better position with “the city”.

What is that relationship like, between the artist and city officials?

DNLM: There is no actual relationship or communication with the officials. As a guerrilla artist, you don’t ask for permission. There is a response, however. For example, in the Higher Standards project, I installed missing mirrors for cyclists’ safety, which the city officials took off as they were not following the standards and replaced them with their own.

What is the relationship between guerrilla artists?

DNLM: When you start working, seeing other artists’ works from elsewhere empowers you and further legitimises your actions. Many of the cities deal with similar problems. Where the state repression is stronger, actions are louder, but also more dangerous.

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