Streetstories : Instagram as Drift

Abstract

Streetstories is an artistic practice that has emerged over the past five years (2020–2025), rather than being deliberately designed. It arose out of necessity — an embodied practice that consists of walking, discovering, capturing, and posting as Instagram Stories frames of rather insignificant dislocated things.

It celebrates the notion of chance — the spontaneous act of photographing seemingly unimportant textual objects found while walking on the street and sharing them. This project embraces the following principles: artistic practice as a minimal gesture of everyday life, resonating with Perec's concept of the significance of insignificant (Highmore, 2018) and the idea of chance. It serves as a gentle reminder to frame the minimal messages and symbols that are spontaneously encountered.

In an age of constant speed and endless scrolling on social media — where everything can be filtered, polished, altered, or AI-generated to attract attention and engagement — Streetstories represents a conscious, perhaps radical choice to frame, share, and archive unimportant textual traces or small objects that catch my eye while walking. While presented exclusively through Instagram Stories, the project intentionally resists the platform's aesthetics of curation and enhancement on which I reflect in this paper.