It’s just great to bring new people into the mix. New people bring new energy to the group and share new stories that will inspire both old and new participants.
The loudest, hard-to-ignore new participants of IBUG Festival 2018 were the self-proclaimed Latin Mafia gang.
“Luca has just booked his ticket to Chemnitz” announced Nnamari, putting her phone away and looking up into our amused eyes. Wasp Elder, Helen Bur and Kenneth Letsoin were just as delighted as me: our IBUG gang was coming back together and we were all so excited about that!
“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.
After eight long weeks of sunshine, the infamous English summer has arrived in Bristol. It happened on the opening weekend of the 10th edition of Upfest, the largest street art and graffiti festival in Europe. Hundreds of street artists and thousands of street art hunters gathered in Bristol hoping to stay dry, although the atmosphere of this world famous Bristol street art festival is so chilled and ‘bristolian’ that, in the end, we didn’t mind the water.
Upfest 2018 is kicking off this weekend.
For me, this was the perfect occasion to come back to Bristol after two years that I’ve left. I arrived on Wednesday and, although the Upfest festival officially opens today, I’ve already spotted several artists at work.
‘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.