Videos today from Oviedo, Spain, which has hosted a mural festival during the last decade – these are from the most recent one in September – evidently a very rainy event! They call is “a cultural, social, and artistic event bringing together citizens and artists to offer the city a new look through its walls.”
Funded by the city and stressing quality over quantity, the program engages the people of the neighborhoods they are in, using “all the techniques, styles and artistic expressions that walls can support, always containing a social commitment.”
A valiant and revolutionary woman and winner of the Nadal Prize for literature in 1952, Delores Medio gets new life here at the 2020 Parees mural festival. Painted by artist Lidia Cao, the character of the writer comes through, a veiled portrait of her personality, her intensity.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Doug Gillen/Fifth Wall TV: Is New Brighton a future model for the British Sea Side Town? 2. Lidia Cao. Tribute to Dolores Medio. Parees Fest 2020 3. INDECLINE: On Second Thought. A reflection on gun violence in collaboration with artist David Fay.
BSA Special Feature: Visit a Sea Side Town with Doug Gillen
You can’t really send out a gilded invitation to your cousin Gentrification to come visit and be surprised when his emotionally draining wife and video-game playing snot-nosed kids are in the car with him. When you use words like “platform” to describe art-washing of a town, and your organization has a “brand director”, there won’t be much surprise when the moneyed professionals complain that music at the curated-bar across the street is keeping their new baby awake at night.
Doug at Fifth Wall is more surreptitiously stealthy than ever, gradually upping his stealthy-stealthitude as he lets this story basically tell itself while posing as a merely curious art-fan.
The story is literally everywhere you look right now, and apolitical, non-confrontational Street Art and murals are almost always intercedent. A small town is sucked dry after decades of neo-liberal economics and back-room political deals, leaving a godless lot feeling listless and depressed without prospects for the future. Broad strokes, but you’ve undoubtedly heard the concept proffered by real estate investors that comes next.
“Yes there’s a commercial side to it but there is also very much a community element to what we’ve been doing,” says one male voice as the camera scans some run-down architecture with good bones and historical character. They’ve been buying up properties and “introducing a new independent concept into them”.
You predict what comes in this chapter; small portions of fussy food, art galleries, street art, vinyl!, kooky cafes with drip coffee and cold brew, clever grandma-anti-fashion fashion, artisanal cheeses, greater police presence and the occasional night-time social cleansing of hardscrabble types pushed into other neighborhoods.
Next step, edgy
lifestyle brands will need some quirky space to set up shop.
“We’re
trying to keep the big boys out of our little part of town.”
“2020 is a year calling out for change,” says Doug in his wrap-up, but he knows this particular model is not at all new. It’s still a reaction to the devastation, and we all seem to be trapped in it. Even so, this can be a kind of rejuvenation that many small towns would ache for and there is reason to think that the formula can be configured to be more just to those who will get displaced – if you’re dedicated to it.
And your cousin Gentrification could be cool to hang out with, even if his very classy wife gently insults your wife and the décor of your home and the food you eat and the music you listen to.
Doug Gillen/Fifth Wall TV: Is New Brighton a future model for the British Sea Side Town?
Lidia Cao. Tribute to Dolores Medio. Parees Fest 2020
Lidia Cao paints a portrait of Dolores Medio, the Spanish writer, teacher, and journalist for the Parees Festival in Spain in this short video by Titi Muñoz.
INDECLINE: On Second Thought. A reflection on gun violence in collaboration with artist David Fay.
600 decommissioned weapons were
combed over and refashioned by Las Vegas based artist David Fay into this
semi-kinectic sculpture that recalls Rodin’s “The Thinker”. In an America that
is fascinated by weapons, at least in movies and television, this sculpture may
make people think, or not.
From their press release: “The
piece stands just over 6 feet tall and weighs approximately 250 pounds. It took
David Fay 4 months and over 750 man-hours to complete the piece.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Minda Hamada y Zosen Bandido in Veracruz 2. Marina Zumi “Lucid Dreams II” 3. Udatxo – Parees Fest 2019. Video by Titi Muñoz 4. Greta Thunberg “How Dare You” Extended Remix
BSA Special Feature: Minda Hamada y Zosen Bandido in Veracruz
Mina Hamada y Zosen Bandido are graphic and poppy in their organic naïve-style collage compositions. Their engaging style lends itself to public arts projects that also promote business and foot traffic. Here they (mostly he) talk about their love of color, their cultural art influences, and their new project this summer in the Art District Boca Del Rio in Veracruz, Mexico.
Marina Zumi “Lucid Dreams II”
Street Artist, muralist, and interactive artist Marina Zumi doesn’t stop exploring the moon and the night sky and those tremulous flickering messages that blip across our consciousness. Perhaps by way of exploring the modern, her newest electronic tracing of shapes and rhythms in the darkness borrow from Tron and early Kraftwerk, comforting and witty in the low-fi and physical familiarity of it all. Part of her show “Techno Poetry,” Zumi continues to break new ground with here lucid dreams.
Udatxo – Parees Fest 2019. Video by Titi Muñoz
Here’s
artist Udatxo painting a new mural at the Parees Fest.
Greta Thunberg “How Dare You” Extended Remix
Get up and dance to a new hit for 2019! Taking recrimination to the dance floor, is the new hit from Greta Thunberg in a heavy German techno style.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1.“Collective Heartbreak” KNOW HOPE at Nuart 2017
2. Igor Ponosov “Too Far, Too Close”
3. UNIQA Art Łódź project in Łódź, Poland
4. Agostino Iaurci for Parees Fest.
BSA Special Feature: “Collective Heartbreak” KNOW HOPE at Nuart 2017
Loquacious street poet Know Hope usually has a lot to say and the Isreali Street Artist’s somewhat cryptic text interludes often accompany imagery on walls and his indoor studio works. Custom made verses, sometimes heart rendering, contemplate isolation, unresolved miscommunications, aspiration, gnawing fears; interstitial vagaries that channel political as personal emotional drama, a suspended state of limbo.
For his interactive installations at Nuart this year Addam Yekutieli aka Know Hope spent time listening. He collected stories from Stavanger locals about their experiences of heartbreak and hand painted fragments from those stories in austere urban . For the outdoor part of the project, Addam extracted fragments of words from their stories and placed them around the city, drawing a common story that he hopes strikes universal truths.
IGOR PONOSOV “Too Far, Too Close”
“ ‘Too far, Too Close’ is a project by the Russian artist Igor Ponosov which sees a typical Stavanger sailing boat transformed into an abstract mural for Nuart Festival 2017.
The project is meant to symbolizes the distance or disconnect between the public and the vast majority of state-sanctioned public art. The piece was supplemented by Ponosov’s second outdoor art work, titled ‘No signal’, which critiques the growing use of projectors in street art mural production.”
UNIQA Art Łódź project in Łódź, Poland.
Regular readers of BSA will recognize almost every one of these sculptures from Łódź, Poland as we have published stories on them previously. Here is a quick round-up of the last couple of years’ worth of public sculptures featured in the UNIQA project, exploring another in-between strata of semi-autonomous Street Art/Public Art involvement that requires permissions (usually) and yet is not choked to death by bureaucratic committee.
Agostino Iacurci for Parees Fest. Oviedo, Asturias. Spain. Video Titi Muñoz
A process video of the creation of a new mural by Italian Street Artist/Muralist Agostino Iacurci done last month in Spain for the Parees Fest. Aside from the impressive result, it is notable to see that he has an ongoing daily audience sitting comfortably before the enormous wall, sipping a coffee.
“Spogo is one of the most reknowned abstract street artists in Spain,” says photographer Fernando Alcalá of the Barcelona based geometrist who has installed a balanced composition that anchored at the base of an elevated freeway here in Oviedo, Asturias in the North of Spain.
The festival is called Parees, a slang derivation of paredes (walls), and this one is meant specificially for Noche Blanca.
Currently having an exhibition at GKO Gallery in Guipúzcoa, Spogo has also had a busy year painting outside in Madrid, Barcelona, Cantabria, Gante, Oviedo, Badalona and Tolosa, says Alcalá. Enjoy the video directed by Titi Muñoz, and image here from Mr. Alcalá.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
