“The glacier has melted by about one meter annually since the turn of the millennium,” says Swedish street artist Vegan Flava. In fact, he says, the southern peak was Sweden’s highest mountain until two years ago as the 40 meter thick glacier continues to melt due the warming of the atmosphere. Now it is lower than the northern peak.
Today we are looking at the artists’ newest mural in Linköping, the title of which references this specific melting occurence “From Here to the Southern Peak.”
The circuitous artist mind imagines a bird from the roots of a blue corn flower in the Swedish province of Östergötland, and this painter meditates on the birds’ flight over rooftops up to the Southern Peak.
Vegan Flava’s interconnectedness of themes reminds us that one vital life system is affected by and often dependent upon the next. “Everything we humans build and live from depends on a stable climate,” Vegan Flava says, “like our water supply, agriculture, infrastructure and healthcare.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada: Somos La Luz (We Are The Light) 2. Vegan Flava: Migration In The Anthropocene 3. “The Birds” by Alfred Hitchcock – Diner Scene
BSA Special Feature: Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada: Somos La Luz (We Are The Light)
“This project is very personal to me. I have lost friends due to Covid 19. During the process of creating this portrait, I was able to meet Dr.Decoo´s family. I saw firsthand their immense sorrow for his loss. His life faded away just as the portrait I created was meant to fade away. Too many frontline workers are in danger of fading away. We must realize that this is in part due to the reality of institutional racism. I have seen the effects of poverty and marginalization. We must come together to address this reality.” – JRG
Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada: Somos La Luz (We Are The Light)
Vegan Flava: Migration In The Anthropocene
Maybe its because this weekend is Halloween but this promo video for street artist/land artist Vegan Flava may bring to mind another movie from this time of year.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Vegan Flava – Signs on the Surface
BSA Special Feature: Vegan Flava – “Signs on the Surface”
Yes, we just passed the Easter/Passover holidays, and many parts of the Northern Hemisphere have already burst into Spring.
In Sweden, it takes a little longer to get to seeing flowers and new grass.
Street Artist Vegan Flava shares with us the product of a full winter of communing with a frozen lake – and finding a way to bring his street art skillz to the ice. Today in one video we present a sizeable compilation of various installations he did when the water was frozen, piled with snow.
He calls them “direct actions”.
“In these pieces I’ve mostly used biodegradeable chalk spray,” he says, “a shovel and ash on the ice and snow.” It’s good to know that he is caring for the earth while making his mark upon it.
In an eerily familiar way, the experience of being out there feels like many people feel right now in quarantine – free with their expansive thoughts and ideas on a never-ending canvas, but not quite comforted. With each text message and skull rendering in the snow, these actually begin to look like graffiti tags, enormous hidden clues to a larger story.
HEAL – Human Earth Animal Liberation. It’s a big aspiration, writ large across this lake. This is just one of his texts, his poems, his urgent slogans.
“With
the winters’ first snowfall, billions of unique crystals fall in slow motion
and cover the landscape,” he says. “It looks like a gigantic sheet of paper. It
is beyond belief to be able to walk across the lake during the winter – the
same that we swim in during summer. If these phenomena weren’t real, I would
dream of things such as this and wish they existed.”
That’s how curator Yasha Young began the UN Biennale in Berlin this month. A fantasy-infused ramble through a future jungle teeming with dark pop goth and an animated gorilla, the multi-featured installation by the outgoing Creative Director was meant to pose questions about a possible future, or many possible futures on an Earth deeply scarred, reclaiming itself from man/womankind’s folly.
Spread along a 100-meter path and teeming with small surprise exhibits popping from the savage magic of two-day overgrowth, the installation appeared to take inspiration, at least in part, from the wildly successful Berlin exhibition two years ago called, “The Haus”, by a trio called Die Dixons. That one featured 175 artists creating immersive, site-specific futurist/fantasy installations on the five floors of a former bank – inviting dance troops and performances and thousands who cued for hours around the block.
One of artists at UN’s “ROBOTS AND RELICS: UN-MANNED”, Herakut, was also in the Haus exhibition and here under the roaring U-Bahn on Bülowstraße produces one of the best synthesis of technology and fantasy. Their sculptural painted theatrical character of Mother Nature is straight from a childs’ imagination, blinking eyes forming a blue inquisitive aura around its visage.
No doubt many visitors winding through this late summer wildness were feeling quizzical to one another, confronting the various staged scenarios by 27 artists and asking “what if…”. Perhaps a lush and greener version of the traveling “29 Rooms” selfie house we saw in Brooklyn a few years ago, this one blended themes of post-disaster with a glistening dark leafy future girded with idiosyncracies and Hans Ruedi Giger airbrushed human/machines locked in biomechanical reverie.
“They
carry us off into barren deserts with relics of human existence,” says the
press release, “colorfully patterned
animals in overgrown areas as well as spherical light worlds.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. RONE Wrecks a Mansion in Melbourne
2. Vegan Flava: The taste of fresh water
3. Vegan Flava: Foot prints in the snow
4. Nina Chanel Abney’s “Colorfully Seductive, Deceptively Simple” Art at ICA Boston
BSA Special Feature: RONE Wrecks a Mansion in Melbourne
You know that a Street Artist is heading toward serious consideration as a collectible artist, no, painter, when they begin invoking the imagery and trappings of European so-called classicism. Here Rone temperately unveils the sweeping view of an estate, the tinkling of grand ivories, the complex mourning of strings, the long veiled windows of the sitting room. It all serves as a set piece for a portrait of the light-skinned royal. This one takes the entire wall and has no gilded frame. But it does have drips, so you know we’re keeping it real, bro.
No candalabras, you ask? Hang in there, Whitaker, they’re coming.
A secret installation inside the Burnham Beeches mansion in Sherbrooke, Victoria, the artist has a velvet crush on the ghosts who may still live here. He sets the stage for their return, and invites you to tour the handsome estate just east of Mellbourne. Bring your gin and vermouth, darling, and enjoy the EMPIRE, while it lasts.
RONE “EMPIRE”
Fresh Water and Foot Prints from Vegan Flava
Switching hemispheres, we fly to lake Översjön in Stockholm
and find Vegan Flava writing in the snow, contemplating existence. First he sets the pristine stage of this two
chapter story. Or rather nature does.
Then he defiles the crystalline palette with aerosol
(biodegradeable black chalk), smudging matter together like a charcoal
portraitist. As the camera pulls away we see the portrait, or relic in the snow.
“How we produce food, consume, and the
burning of fossil fuels leaves the footprints of collapsed ecosystems,” he
says, “melting the worlds glaciers, dead ocean floors, logged and burned
forests, dirty air and waters.”
Vegan Flava: The taste of fresh water
Vegan Flava: Foot prints in the snow
Nina Chanel Abney’s “Colorfully Seductive, Deceptively Simple” Art
Sometimes the most impactful art is the kind that begins the conversation with you and can go deeper with you if you would like it to, but can stay on the surface if that is all you can countenance on that particular day.
Perhaps the rapid romance that fans have had with muralist Nina Chanel Abney is her self-described approach of creating “deceptively simple investigations of contemporary cultural issues.” Currently on exhibition at ICA Boston, her work is described by the organizer as “Deeply invested in creating imagery that is legible and accessible, Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982, Chicago) is known for weaving colorful geometric shapes, cartoons, language, and symbols into chaotic and energetic compositions.”
Also; systemic racism, police violence, unjust incarceration, white privilege.
When you are ready to go there, she will too. Ready? Let’s go!
Here it is! Photographer Jaime Rojo of BSA selects a handful of his favorite images from his travels through 9 countries and around New York this year to present our 2018 BSA Images of the Year.
Seeing the vast expressions of aesthetics and anti-aesthetic behavior has been a unique experience for us. We’re thankful to all of the artists and co-conspirators for their boundless ideas and energy, perspectives and personas.
Once you accept that much of the world is in a semi-permanent chaos you can embrace it, find order in the disorder, love inside the anger, a rhythm to every street.
And yes, beauty. Hope you enjoy BSA Images of the Year 2018.
Here’s a list of the artists featured in the video. Help us out if we missed someone, or if we misspelled someones nom de plume.
1Up Crew, Abe Lincoln Jr., Adam Fujita, Adele Renault, Adrian Wilson, Alex Sena, Arkane, Banksy, Ben Eine, BKFoxx, Bond Truluv, Bordalo II, Bravin Lee, C215, Cane Morto, Charles Williams, Cranio, Crash, Dee Dee, D*Face, Disordered, Egle Zvirblyte, Ernest Zacharevic, Erre, Faith LXVII, Faust, Geronimo, Gloss Black, Guillermo S. Quintana, Ichibantei, InDecline, Indie 184, Invader, Isaac Cordal, Jayson Naylor JR, Kaos, KNS, Lena McCarthy, Caleb Neelon, LET, Anthony Lister, Naomi Rag, Okuda, Os Gemeos, Owen Dippie, Pejac, Pixel Pancho, Pork, Raf Urban, Resistance is Female, Sainer, Senor Schnu, Skewville, Slinkachu, Solus, Squid Licker, Stinkfish, Strayones, Subway Doodle, The Rus Crew, Tristan Eaton, Vegan Flava, Vhils, Viktor Freso, Vinie, Waone, Winston Tseng, Zola
It’s BSA Film Friday! Now we present the best of the year, according to you. We bring you new videos each week – about 240 of them this year. The beauty of the experience is that it can feel quite random and exhilarating – rather like the serendipity of finding new Street Art.
You helped us decide who made it to the top 15 – and we feel proud to see some of these because we liked them too. When we take videos on the road to different cities and countries doing our BSA Film Friday LIVE we also like to share these in classrooms or theaters or lecture halls with locals, students, city leaders. Nothing can beat seeing faces light up, a person thrilled to finally get the sense of something, better understanding the scene, helping people with a new way to look at art in the streets.
The best part is many of these videos encourage you to create, to co-create, to actively participate in public space with meaning and intention. As a collection, these 15 are illuminating, elevating, riveting, strange, soaring, secretly otherworldly, and achingly beautifully human.
Special congratulations go out to artists/directors Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk who landed on the list two times this year, including the number 1 position. Their work is about the intersection of art and theory and life, how to create it, to see it, and how to re-see your world.
We hope you can take some time to enjoy some of the best Street Art videos from around the world and on BSA this year.
“Listen, my only request…. When you’re done doing your thing, do an Italian flag with my daughter’s name on it,” says a guy who is shouting up from the street to the roof where two Hungarian graff writers are preparing to hit a wall with a giant rat in Jersey. That rat looks fantastic as it basks in the blinking glow of the marquee for Vinny Italian Gourmet on the streets in the Newark night below.
That scene alone can stand as their American iconic moment for the US Tapes, but Fatheat and TransOne documented a number of golden moments on their trip this winter to New York, Wynwood, LA, and Las Vegas. Travel with them as they try to square the television mythology of modern America with the one they are encountering in all its ridiculous free-wheeling self satisfied unreflective emotional consumerist funkified freedom*. Standby for sonic blasts from the cultural pulp soundbook and prepare for a celebrity visit.
Slyly they observe and sample and taste and catalogue the insights by traversing the main stage and the margins, smartly not taking it too seriously, finding plenty of places for wide-eyed wonder and wiseguy sarcasm. Steeped in graffiti history with mad skillz themselves, this is all an adventure. Generous of heart, they also share it with you.
“And lost be the day to us in which a measure hath not been danced.”
~ from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra
Every day since the shootings of artists and journalists at the Charlie Hebdo offices on January 14, 2015, dancer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier has made sure to dance for a minute or more. It sounds like a good idea.
“Without editing or effects, in the place and state of mind I find myself that day, with no special technique, staging, clothing, or makeup, nothing but what is there,” she says on her website.
“I dance inside or outside, in public or private places, alone or with others, strangers or people I know, sometimes friends.
I dance as protesters demonstrate, to effect a living poetry, to act through sensitivity against the violence of certain aspects of the world.
This is the solution I found: an action to my own measure, a concrete, repeated action that may redraw lines, disrupt the design, shake up the norms.”
Here she is in Paris on Esperance Street in front of a mural by Street Artist Seth.
All the subversive drama of a terrorist cell, all the color of Mardi Gras, all the pomp and ceremony of an Olympic triathlon. Wielding the long-handled roller like a javelin in the hands of Järvinen, weight lifting multiple backpacks full of paint cans, climbing and jumping walls with speed and dexterity, the 1UP team goes for the gold.
Debuting today on BSA is the flaming new 1UP crew video directed by the ingenious Selina. Slicing the streets with the drone camera like a hot knife through butter, she follows the unruly yet highly organized vandals from overhead in a manner more melodic than menacing as Miles lines up one shot after another in this instantly classic continuous thread of aerosol mayhem.
Passing the aerosol can like a baton, this relay race puts 1UP over the finish line while many rivals would have just blasted out of the blocks. But will those Olympian circles turn into golden handcuffs before the closing ceremony?
A quick overview to catch you up on the 7 most recent pieces attributed to Banksy in Paris. He’s said to be creating work more attuned to the plight of migration, but others have observed it is a return to the classic Banksy sarcastic sweetness that has characterized the clever sudden missives he has delivered since he began. See Butterfly Art News’ coverage here: Paris: Banksy for World Refugee Day
It’s an Italian movie directed by Luchino Visconti in 1960, yes. It is also the name of a crew of Berlin graffiti/installation artists whose satirical interventions play on issues propriety and property – and on social experiments that dupe the media, the public, and banks.
Did they really set up an apartment inside the subway? Is that really the tracks and wall of a metro inside a gallery? Is that Wagner playing in the mobile war arcade set up in the Christmas market? Are those hand grenades being lobbed by children? Is the bank facade blinking red every 20 seconds?
Rocco und seine Brüder (Rocco and His Brothers) have you engaged. Now you have to answer the questions.
The Uruguayan Street Artists/muralist Florencia Durán and Camilo Nuñez are “Colectivo Licuado” and here in the middle of Oviedo in Northern Spain to create a new mural for the Parees fest this September. As is their practice they study the culture that they are visiting and create an allegory that is familiar to the community, if still rather mystical.
In this case they visit Colectivo Licuado & Nun Tamos Toes for a visit of great cultural exchange – sharing sketches, songs, and learning the history of women’s roles in traditional Asturian culture. The resulting mural project is collaborative in nature and powerful in person.
“I pay attention to the intensity of the gaze and the posture, so the passerby is challenged and seeks to question the project.”
A sociological experiment and intervention on the streets by the French Street Artist YZ takes place in Abidjan and camera work in the crowds allows you to appreciate the action on the street. A city of 4.7 million people and the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire, the city has a lively culture of street vending that is unregulated and often populated by children.
YZ speaks with the folks she meets who are vending, who she refers to as “girls” although many are women. Her goal is to better understand them, she says, and to create a Street Art campaign of their portraits.
“I realized that their situation was very different from the men. So I wanted to know more about them. So I started the project ‘Street Vendors’,” she says.
Chernobyl is a nuclear disaster that figures profoundly into the modern age – and for centuries into the future.
Today not so many people talk about this man-made horror that killed a Russian town and chased out its survivors in 1986 just 90 kilometers northeast of Kiev. Called the most disastrous nuclear accident in history, it evacuated 115,000 and spread a radioactive cloud around the Earth, with European neighbors like Scandinavia, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, France and the UK detecting the effects of radiation for years afterward. Three scientists at The New York Academy of Sciences have estimated that over time the number of people killed by effects from the meltdown was almost a million.
Because of the nature of radiation, Chernobyl has been estimated to not be safely habitable for about 20,000 years.
A short documentary today taking us through last autumns On October 7th in Marseille, France in collaboration with Galerie Saint Laurent and Spanish artist Gonzalo Borondo as they presented Matière Noire. A massive collection of individual installations that took over the top floor of an exhibition space normally used for shops, Borondo’s influence in the selections is throughout, a story told in three acts on Projection, Perception and Interpretation.
“When I was just a baby, my Mama told me, ‘Son, always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns.’ But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Johnny Cash sings with some bravado in Folsom Prison Blues on an album released 50 years ago this year. Street Artist Shepard Fairey honors the album and here in Sacramento, California to raise consciousness about the outrageously high rate of incarceration here. “The United States has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of it’s prisoners,” he says, making you question the system in the Land of the Free.
No. 5
MZM Projects – Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk/”Wasteland Wanderers”
This week we feature a couple of new film pieces from the Ukraine based duo of Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoschuk which fairly present an insightful treatise on a particular flavor of Post-Graffiti. Think of it as a two volume textbook and your professors will guide you through the darkness into the light.
A Dilogy.
“The place tells you what to do,” is a poetic and truthful phrase uttered in “Night” on the relationship a vandal has to an abandoned factory, school, home, medical facility; it is spacial and alchemical.
It is also personal, says the female narrator. “The presence of their absence,” is something that every Wasteland Wanderer will be familiar with, the knowledge and feeling that others have been there before you. The work is undeniably affected, even created in response.
“I’ve started a new series called ‘On the Road’ which looks at life behind the scenes in street art culture,” Doug Gillen tells us about this debut episode. Look forward to Doug’s unique perspective on Street Art festivals, art fairs, and studio visits as he expands to the world of urban contemporary.
Not typically who you think of as a Street Artist, here we see Add Fuel and Doug talk about his first book and you see examples of work from this tile maker who infuses traditional Portuguese techniques and pattern making with pop-modern cultural references and cartoon archetypes.
He has a hat, sunglasses, and he has been creating huge black and white photo installations of people wheat-pasted to the sides of buildings for how long? Surprising to us that Jetsonorama is not more of a household name in Street Art circles – his work is solidly tied to biography and human rights, uses his own photography, and routinely elevates humanity – and has been doing it for some time now.
Why isn’t he in huge museum exhibitions?
Today we have a new video giving you a good look at the work and the artist along with the genuine connection and presence that he has with community, taking the time to share their stories.
“The speed of ruin is just something else,” says Street Artist Vegan Flava, and it’s an exasperating realization. Extrapolated to thinking about the enormous war industry, and there is such a thing, you realize that pouring money year after year into ever more sophisticated and destructive weaponry only results in broken bridges, buildings, water systems, vital infrastructure, lives.
Construction, on the other hand, can be arduous and time consuming, takes vision, planning, collaboration, and fortitude. Like great societies.
How quickly they can be eroded, destroyed.
But since Vegan Flava is creating during this destructive enterprise, you get a glimpse into his creativity, and sense of humor. Similarly the psychographics of this story and how it is told reveal insights into the artist and larger themes.
“A drawing, an idea on a piece of paper, can swiftly grow into something larger, thoughts and actions leading to the next. But creating something is never as fast as to tear it to pieces. The speed of ruin is just something else,” he says.
No. 1
MZM Projects – Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk /”Aesthetic of Eas”
“We wanted everything to occur naturally in this movie. We wanted to achieve spontaneity,” say film makers Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoshchuk about their up close look at graffiti writer/abstract painter EAS. In this new film they have captured the creative spirit in action as unobtrusively as they could, allowing the artist to speak – in a way he never does, they say.
Today on BSA Film Friday we’re proud to debut this new portrait by three artists – one painter and two film makers – to encourage BSA readers to take a moment and observe, inside and outside.
Biggie Smalls and Alfred Hitchcock open Autumn Equinox for BSA this week and we can’t help but think of that movie “The Birds” by the English film director where nature turns against man. Kiwi Street Artist Owen Dippie painted the mural in Brooklyn at the end of the summer and the mashup of references between the Brooklyn rapper and the dark cinematic thrillmaster in black and white may frighten you if you imagine those birds balanced at the end of their cigars began to peck their eyes out.
Friday night marked a new milestone for Urban Nation Museum For Urban Contemporary Art in Berlin there was a preview of the newly completed and opened artists’ residencies put on display. We were treated to the creative environments of 11 of the residencies with the first group of artists in attendance including NeSpoon, Herakut, Li-Hill, Snik, Ludo, Mia Florentine Weiss, Quintessenz, Sellfable, Dot Dot Dot, Louis Masai, Wes 21 and Onur. The museum will open its doors again for the museum’s second exhibition titled “The Power of Art as a Social Architect” this Thursday. Check it out if you are in Berlin.
So here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring 1UPCrew, Adele Renault, AKUT, Berlin Kidz, BustArt, Dina Saadi, Exit Art, L.E.T., M-City, Mehsos, Owen Dippie, Snik, and Vegan Flava.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. INDECLINE Billboard “Clown” Takeover
2. FACTORY OF KAOZ
3. Vegan Flava: A million years lost in a moment. Trollhättan, Sweden
4. “ARTinfect IV – The PFAFF Project” in Kaiserslautern, Germany
BSA Special Feature: INDECLINE Billboard “Clown” Takeover
In Los Angeles the activist Street Art posse named INDECLINE overtook a billboard recently to grab attention of those whom they are afraid are being slowly lulled by the circus of distraction and Tweets that make America Hate Again.
FACTORY OF KAOZ
We had the opportunity to experience some Liepzig Kaoz this week inside a factory that lays abandoned, yet full of opportunity for graffiti and Street Artists who explore its many rooms and stairs and broken windows. For Kaoz it is nearly a portfolio of his works, as well as a stage for fashion shoots, a set for photo projects. Join him as he shows you around the place, and watch your step.
Vegan Flava: A Million Years Lost in a Moment. Trollhättan, Sweden.
The briefest video here from a familiar Stockholm face as we see this piece from Vegan Flava in Trollhättan that he says is meant to address the norms of what to eat and consume in our culture; norms that are quickly destroying in a relative moment the Earth that took a million years to get to this point. He tells us that he believes we need to shift our thoughts and practices to value nature and animals.
“Ecocide is the crime of all time. It is destabilizing the world as people will have to flee from environmental disasters or conflicts concerning natural resources. The dominant culture is lethal to every aspect of this planet. Giving rights to nature and animals similar to human rights would enable to juridically protect ecosystems from collapse, freshwater from pollution, forests from destruction and animals from extinction.”
“ARTinfect IV – The PFAFF Project”
A roll-call video of participants from the Pfaff Project featuring fantasy, gothic, illustration-based, graffiti and Street Art inside an ex-urban spot now converted for a rolling display of fresh works in Kaiserslautern, a city in southwest Germany located in the Bundesland of Rhineland-Palentinate.
Here you can catch shots of artists like Zeso, Bustart, Serge, Pollo7, Meret, Snare79, DRÜ Egg, Chromeo, and ENDO.
For about seven years (2007-14) the city of Stockholm practiced a so-called “zero tolerance” policy against graffiti and Street Art, following the exalted/derided ‘broken windows’ theory (Wilson and Kelling, 1982). As recently as 2011 the touring national theatre company named Riksteartern ran into serious trouble with city leaders when promoting an international Street Art convention called “Art of the Streets” because it violated the spirit of the policy.
The loosening of the strict approach in 2014 coincided with the dawn of Snösätra, a bastion of urban art practice in a rough and industrial part of southern Stockholm. Landowners there gave permission for the painting of pieces, burners, productions, and murals by graffiti writers and Street Artists all along the streets of this sector in the suburb of Rågsved where about 30 businesses cater to construction, recycling, and mechanics. A new annual festival has popped up there with DJs and live painting and various shows and celebrations throughout the summer.
Magic City, the traveling exhibition celebrating 50+ years of a wide swath of urban art practice globally, has been successfully drawing audiences here down in the industrial docks of Stockholm since last year as well, a sign of the evolving perspective on the topic. We’ve had the honor of being in both of these venues inside and outside this week and can tell you that the results in many cases are spectacular.
In addition to exploring the current works in Snösätra with local artist Vegan Flava, we hit some of the larger commissioned murals in the more bohemian streets of Stockholm and helped celebrate Magic City’s HUGE weekend, named after the local graffiti writer who specializes in photorealistic lettering in the style of helium balloons.
Both of our BSA Film Weekend programs Friday and Saturday night were a lot of fun – complete with families and kids and a few scholars and graff historians sprinkled in for flavor. We thank everyone who came up to introduce themselves and even the shy ones whom we saw from a distance.
Our sincere thanks to Vegan Flava, whose work is on the streets and in Magic City, all of the artists, curators Carlo McCormick and Ethel Seno, and director Christoph Scholz with the whole Magic City team.
Here are some of the images from our travels during this quick visit to Stockholm.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring 1Up, Alkie,Amara Por Dios, Arrow, Biesk, Disk, BrasilSuecia, Frankie Strand, Holem, Hop Louie, Mark Bode, Mnek, Os Gemeos, Peter Birk, RCW, Sweet Toof, Sibylla Nohrborh, Tear, Tonk, Vegan Flava, Vickan Art, Yash, CAS Crew,Cheat,Poker One,Kiss, and Ziggy.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. “While They Seek Solutions” by Vegan Flava
2. The Brooklyn Burrow: Episode 1. Iena Cruz
3. MOMO: A (brief) tour of the nomadic artist’s New Orleans Studio
4. 167 Art Project – Lecce, Italy.
BSA Special Feature: “While They Seek Solutions” by Vegan Flava
“The speed of ruin is just something else,” says Street Artist Vegan Flava, and it’s an exasperating realization. Extrapolated to thinking about the enormous war industry, and there is such a thing, you realize that pouring money year after year into ever more sophisticated and destructive weaponry only results in broken bridges, buildings, water systems, vital infrastructure, lives.
Construction, on the other hand, can be arduous and time consuming, takes vision, planning, collaboration, and fortitude. Like great societies.
How quickly they can be eroded, destroyed.
But since Vegan Flava is creating during this destructive enterprise, you get a glimpse into his creativity, and sense of humor. Similarly the psychographics of this story and how it is told reveal insights into the artist and larger themes.
“A drawing, an idea on a piece of paper, can swiftly grow into something larger, thoughts and actions leading to the next. But creating something is never as fast as to tear it to pieces. The speed of ruin is just something else,” he says.
The Brooklyn Burrow: Episode 1. Iena Cruz
“I don’t have a limitation on techniques,” says Iena Cruz in this new video of a series documenting the current Brooklyn scene. We’ve seen the artist changing his style gradually in shows and on the street for about five years now, and his curiosity for discovery is part of what defines his style- along with his color palette perhaps. Here director Brad Ford and Owly team document the creation and on-street reactions to Cruz’ 3-D version of the Stay Puft man from Ghostbusters.
MOMO: A (brief) tour of the nomadic artist’s New Orleans Studio
“I arrive with my best possible idea,” says MOMO, “and I hope people like it”. First seen here in Brooklyn and Manhattan a decade ago, the bright fire of MOMO’s mind continues to burn through technical and abstract experimentation on the street. Here he lends his talent to a brand for a commercial gig in a nicely filmed brief interview.
167 Art Project – Lecce, Italy.
Scenes from an Italian neighborhood here as the community mural project 167 Art brings Artez, Mantra, Bifido&Julieta XLF, and Chekos’art to create high quality compositions to a curious and appreciative audience. The technical skill, pacing, music, and video flourishes compliment the story – which necessarily is the people of the neighborhood and the artists laboring talents.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1.Vegan Flava. Throwing Leaves Against Machines.
2. Andrew Hem “Misty Blue”
3. Laura Llaneli: 12 + 1 in Barcelona 4. Misha Most. Evolution -2. The largest mural in the world. Vyksa, Russia
5. Agnès Varda JR’s Faces Places (Visages, Villages). Trailer.
BSA Special Feature: Vegan Flava. Throwing Leaves Against Machines.
“We are exploring crossroads where different creative paths such as painting, video-making, dancing and music meet,” Vegan Flava tells us about this new collaborative performance he has just completed with his friend Mario Perez Amigo.
They call it “Throwing Leaves Against Machines” and it is the third video chapter of a series named Northern Street Sketches. This painting and dance performance took play at Subtopia in the Botkyrka municipality of Stockholm – the city where both artists hail from.
Taking place the same night that Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Paris agreement on climate change, Vegan Flava tells us that the video is “a climate action performance addressing the costs consumerism today imposes on future generations, and time is limited.”
Andrew Hem “Misty Blue”
Street culture and impressionism filter into the singular form compositions of Los Angeleno Andrew Ham. In this hand painted mural with The Avenue Concept in Providence, he tells the story of a child he met. The artist shoes how he mixes paint and speaks of his practice of going far from the wall to make sure the mural “reads” well from a distance.
Laura Llaneli: 12 + 1 in Barcelona
Back in June we showed you process photos of this wall in Barcelona in a posting entitled Laura Llaneli “OUR ACTIONS BECOMING THE POLICY”. It is an interesting concept of translating a short speech, a tirade actually, of a singer upbraiding audience members for not fitting his image of them -as if his self-image was derived from the audience. True, mom always said, “Show me your friends and I can tell you what kind of person you are.”
Misha Most. Evolution -2. The largest mural in the world. Vyksa, Russia
Periodically you hear a claim of a mural being the largest. This one by Misha Most with the folks from Artmossphere looks pretty close!
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
