Liverpool astonished me with a grassroots scene where both graffiti and street art have found their own space. On the legal side, walls are provided to both graffiti writers and street artists by a young yet kick-ass festival named Contrast Mural; on the illegal side, writers share the streets with the members of the Secret Society of Super Villain Artists, which was founded in Liverpool 7 years ago. Enjoy my guide to graffiti and street art in Liverpool!
After a cozy weekend with my big, fat, Italo-French family, it was time to hit the city and explore the street art of Paris. I opted for the 13th district, where some great murals have just been added to an already outstanding collection of public art to inaugurate the open-air street art museum “Boulevard Paris 13”, a project curated by Itinerrance gallery.
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.