As you might know, back in April I attended The Crystal Ship street art festival in the Belgian coastal city of Ostend.
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!]
It’s not a secret that Tor Pignattara is one of my favourite areas in all of Rome, and the overabundance of street art that one can find wandering around here is just one of the things that I love about this multicultural neighbourhood the most.
As one more year passed by, I found myself thinking about my happiest moments from 2016 and –undoubtedly- attending the legendary Nuart street art festival in Stavanger (Norway) was one of them.
Apart from a couple of interviews (with Axel Void and Henrik Uldalen), I still haven’t told you anything about that amazing experience, although you might have seen my round-up of outdoor and indoor murals and my recap of Nuart Plus academic conferences on I Support Street Art, the website I was representing at the festival.
Or, better, I should say as seen on the streets of the Northern Quarter, as almost all murals can be spotted in this neighbourhood. Once the centre of the cotton industry, nowadays Manchester’s Northern Quarter is the hipster heaven of the city, and the best place to find some great street art. The most spectacular large-scale murals in the area were painted during Cities of Hope, a street art festival highlighting social injustices while raising money for Manchester charities.
If you are not into street art, don’t bother going as far as Lagos, in the Algarve, the southernmost region of Portugal. The town is very touristy, restaurants aren’t inspiring and, besides a few charming houses in the city centre, the town is made up of ugly concrete buildings and huge hotels.
But if you are into street art, Lagos is the place to go! Especially if, after a graffiti hunt, you fancy a rest at one of the many beautiful beaches not so far from the city centre.