Artistic guerrillas in the age of digital culture

On April 29, 2026, in the early hours of the day, a statue was erected in the heart of London, on a central block of Pall Mall, a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace. Representing a modern man advancing towards the void, his face covered with the flag he is brandishing, it was quickly identified as a work of street most famous artist on the planet: Banksy. Not only did the latter put his signature on the base of the statue, but, the next day, took credit for his action by posting, on his Instagram account, a short video showing how the work was installed almost as quickly as his stencils are on urban walls.

Why a statue and not the usual stencils that onlookers easily recognize and that public authorities most often seek to preserve despite their illegal nature? Banksy, whose identity was finally revealed in March 2026, has in reality become an artivist phenomenon[1] very recent: the “wild monument”. Having passed the time of counter-monuments, one of the distinctive features of which is to pose as the inversion of monumental statuary, our era is in fact marked by the clandestine erection of works which, while responding to the very formatted plastic grammar of statuary to great men, constitute a counterpoint ephemeral and protesting against monuments erected with the intention of eternity. 

Trump naked in public space

It was in August 2016, in the context of the electoral campaign led by Donald Trump with a view to his accession to a first presidential term, that the INDECLINE collective demanded the installation, in several American cities, of statues representing the billionaire in his simplest form. Arms crossed on a protruding stomach, this effigy of Trump, made of clay and silicone, appears neither totally as an artistic gesture, nor even as the product of a strictly militant action, but rather as a s