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.
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.
Debussy said music is all about “the silence between the notes”.
In between IBUG 2017 and an uncertain conversion -perhaps into arts and crafts workshops, artists’ studios or a farmers’ market– the VEB Spezialmaschinenfabrik is packed with silence.
“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.
This is one of the most exciting moments of the summer!
I’ve just received a bunch of photos of the abandoned factory where IBUG Festival 2018 will take place.
It’s a former needle and blanket factory called NAPLAFA, located in Chemnitz (West-Saxony).