“Glued to the city”. Urban semiotics and political ideology in Bucharest’s stickers

Abstract

This paper explores the sticker as a semiotic and ideological element in urban space, through which social groups communicate competing meanings. From a methodological point of view, starting from the character of the flâneur, walking is considered a useful tool for understanding the signifiers of the city. Thus, this paper presents a content analysis of the stickers displayed in the central area of Bucharest, documenting over a thousand stickers. Two stickers with an anticommunist message numerically dominate the other stickers in the analysis. Researching the emitters of these messages, the paper concludes that anticommunism is used by them in order to propagate far-right ideas and to glorify the Romanian legionary movement.

Keywords

• stickers
• flâneur
• semiotics
• anticommunism