Unlike many other cities, Ghent’s street art legacy developed from the bottom-up, rooted in the passion of local artists and their connections to international artists whom they invited to paint.
I haven’t been to Prague for 20 years, and yet I immediately felt at home. It must have been for the language, so similar to Slovene that I can understand a good 50% of what people say.
The warmth of this unexpected homey feeling compensated for the fact that I hadn’t spotted much street art in Prague.
“We should ask Ammar what the traditional games played in Egypt are. Then we teach them to the kids of Bijlmer and arrange a play-day for the vernissage of the mural” I said to Anouk while we were setting the dinner table and a full white moon was shining on the wide, iconic windows of Amsterdam’s buildings.
On that afternoon, Anouk had shown me the ‘ghetto of Amsterdam’ and I couldn’t get over all those kids from various ethnicities playing together, or their laughs echoing over the lake that majestically mirrored the 11-storey wall that soon would have been painted by Ammar Abo Bakr.
‘I’m sending a postcard to my gran’ commented Wasp Elder, looking at the winding streets and the red-ish shades of the postcard-pretty Acquapendente, an enchanting village in that area of Northern Lazio called ‘Tuscia,’ which once was inhabited by Etruscans.
Nestled in the unspoilt nature and not so far from the picturesque Bolsena Lake, this little village is the evidence that you don’t need to go to a metropolis to hunt some great street art in Italy. In Acquapendente, urban art perfectly fits with ceramics, red bricks, and old stones.
As you might know, back in April I attended The Crystal Ship street art festival in the Belgian coastal city of Ostend.It was my first time there and I made a point to catch up with all the excellent public art works that have been produced since 2016 in Ostend, a city that is definitely standing out thanks to an enticing programme of contemporary and urban art events.
Everybody seems to think that street art in Berlin is dead and undoubtedly the city isn’t anymore the ultimate destination for graffiti writers and all kinds of artists.
However, Berlin is home to two of the most popular graffiti crews worldwide (1UP and Berlin Kidz), a quirky Museum of Stickers and the art-gallery-turned-street-art-museum Urban Nation Berlin.
Urban Nation is responsible for the majority of urban art in the city, so our Berlin street art tour couldn’t start anywhere else than from their HQs on Bulowstrasse.
[UPDATE 2018: At last, I visited Urban Nation, read more below!]