This is where street art festivals are being asked to mature.
This editorial on the future of street art festival was originally published in my street art newsletter, Beyond the Walls, which lands in inboxes on the 1st of every month with reflections and unexpected finds. This excerpt is from the July 1st, 2026, edition. Subscribe here to receive future issues.
This month’s editorial was sparked by a transformation I have been closely involved in: the passage of CVTà Street Fest from a festival format to an artist residency program. More than a change of structure, I see it as a sign of where street art festivals may be heading: beyond the logic of the event, towards slower, deeper, and more responsible ways of working with public space, artists, and local communities.
This month I’m writing to you from Civitacampomarano, the semi-abandoned village in southern Italy where I return every year to manage the social media for CVTà Street Fest, Alice Pasquini’s street art festival.
This year feels particularly special because we opened an art gallery and are transforming the festival into an artist residency. The communication around the project has become much more layered, and I’m finding myself unpacking this shift one layer at a time. The part that fascinates me most is the end of the festival as we knew it and the beginning of a new format that will allow artists to work more deeply, create more meaningful projects, and build a stronger relationship with the place.
Can Fewer Walls Create More Meaning?
After ten years of CVTà Street Fest, this year we changed rhythm. We felt that the festival had accomplished what it was born to do: it had welcomed artists and visitors to Civitacampomarano, a village marked by depopulation, filled its empty streets with people, and transformed a place far from the usual cultural maps into one of Europe’s most unexpected street art destinations.
Precisely because of this, continuing in the same way no longer felt like the most honest choice. From this year on, CVTà will grow as an artist residency program, hosting one artist at a time and allowing each project to unfold through research, stories, daily encounters, and a slower relationship with the place and the people who inhabit it.
I believe, and honestly hope, that many street art festivals will move in a similar direction in the coming years, because the opposite drift is becoming impossible to ignore: a growing culture of Instagram-driven muralism that is producing more images in the streets, with less and less meaning attached to them.
Can street art still be meaningful if we keep producing it at the speed of events?
The problem is not the festival format itself. Festivals can still create powerful moments of encounter, discussion, fun, and shared attention around street art. The problem begins when the format becomes a machine that has to produce at high speed: artists invited for a few days, walls assigned in advance, images created to be photographed from the right angle, made to exist through the endless cycle of online visibility.
Even the act of choosing the wall can disappear from the process. Yet looking for the right location, reading the street, and understanding how an image might live in relation to its surroundings have always been core elements of street art, as we explored in last month’s newsletter.
In this system, research, hesitation, listening, and context are often the first things to disappear, as the mural is conceived elsewhere and only occasionally adapted to fit a wall, a theme, or a local reference. The result can still be beautiful, technically impressive, and visually effective. It works perfectly online, where context is collapsed. Yet it remains detached from the place where it appears. It could have been painted in another city, or even another country, without its meaning changing in any substantial way. Within this economy, this absence of roots is no longer perceived as a problem, because the work is primarily expected to circulate on Instagram. For me, the problem is twofold: street art becomes portable content, while public space is reduced to a surface, much like advertising billboards do.
I noticed this again earlier this month while working at WOOL in Covilhã, Portugal, a festival that is not an artist residency, although its approach often feels much closer to that of a residency than to the production rhythm of many urban art festivals. Artists are not invited simply to bring an image to Covilhã; they are invited to spend time in the city and let the work take shape from what they encounter there.
This is why I think the real question is not whether a project takes the form of a festival or a residency, but whether it gives artists enough time, space, and trust to create work that is genuinely contextual. At CVTà, we chose to make that space by becoming a residency; other festivals may find different forms, but the direction, to me, should be the same: less pressure to produce quick, easy-to-like images, and more room for artists to understand the places they are working with and create something meaningful in that specific context.
Maybe this is where many street art festivals are now being asked to mature: by questioning the idea that their value depends on producing more walls, getting more likes, or attracting more visitors. Slowing down is not stepping back; this was the conviction behind our decision at CVTà. It can be a way of investing more attention and always-scarce resources in fewer projects, of allowing artists to move beyond the ready-made image and return to the practices that should be at the centre of street art: research, sketches, studies, conversations, observation, doubt, friction, and the possibility of changing direction.
One more thing I noticed this past weekend in Civitacampomarano is that the artists who returned to celebrate this shift towards residency with us very naturally embraced the idea of creating something spontaneously in the village. They looked for their own locations, followed what caught their eye, and painted intimate works on a human scale, born where the arm can reach, at most with the help of a ladder.
I have been advocating for human-scale street art for a while now, and I feel this should probably become the topic of another newsletter. This time, though, I wanted to stay with the feeling I had after this month between WOOL and CVTà: that other directions are possible, and that they are already being tested by people who care enough to change the conditions of production rather than keep feeding the same cycle.
After so many editorials spent discussing what is going wrong, I felt I owed you some hopeful thoughts too. I do feel positive after this past month. Tired, very much so, but also convinced that the conversation does not have to remain trapped in criticism. There are festivals already working with more attention, where artworks are allowed to grow out of a real encounter, and there are artists who want time to look, listen, sketch, and change direction.
And yes, a residency might not be a perfect solution, and not every festival needs to become one, but residencies do make one thing clear: depth needs a real relationship with the place.
If the future of street art festivals is not simply to grow through Instagram visibility, then perhaps the most urgent question is not how many images they can send into circulation, but whether the works they produce can still belong to the places where they appear.
