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- in Street Art
“Rewilding” Nuart Aberdeen Festival 2022
Street artists and muralists from across the World once again descended on Aberdeen for the 2023 Nuart Festival. 12 artists created eight new painted murals alongside four street works which primarily featuring paste up and poster art.It marked another successful return to Aberdeen for Nuart who were celebrating their sixth year of working with the city. As in previous years, the combination of permanent and transitionary artworks provided a real art feast for people to seek out and stumble upon.Returning to the Scottish city, Nuart Aberdeen 2023 will feature 13 artists who will paint their imaginative and engaged murals around the city centre and its surrounding areas. The list includes AIDA Wilde, Eloise Gillow, Escif, Jamie Reid, KMG, Manolo Mesa, Murmure, NeSpoon, SNIK, Stanley Donwood, Swoon, Tamara Alves, and Thiago Mazza.“Rewilding”. A topical theme that touches on many issues related to “Trespass and Transgression” which we’ve been researching this past year with friends and colleagues for Nuart Journal, but one which provokes different questions and responses as it sends us down different pathways and tributaries.Rewilding isn’t without its own issues of course – it’s not all meadows full of wildflowers and the freedom to roam. There’s also the question of the local industries and people that have for generations built their lives around the enclosing of “common” land – not unlike those “creative industries” that have grown exponentially around “art” and the “artist”. In taking a “birds eye” view of a future “rewilded” city, where the roots from the art on the streets are entwined around the granite columns of our illustrious art institutions, and the carefully curated and cultivated flowers of the institution are flooding through the double doors and out into the high-street, we attempt to provoke reflections on what a city where art is truly free, might look, sound, smell and feel like. What happens to those industries and “enclosures” when art becomes unshackled from its chains?In a culture of the permissioned and commissioned mural where the tag still runs wild and free, how do we harness the power of one without losing the vitality and exuberance of the other?It’s an interesting picture, and those are exactly what we live for – and what we’ll hopefully be contributing to the local environment come June. We hope you’ll join us in exploring some of these new works and themes.‘To be honest, it will be some time before I’ve processed everything about Nuart 2023, in a lot of respect, when a Nuart “ends” , it’s very much the beginning for me. So I’ll let it settle, pick up the bills, enjoy the imagery and memories and hopefully come away with a sense of fulfillment. In saying that, I think that anyone involved in previous editions, would attest that there was something quite magical about this year. It really felt like we were a community of like-minded souls, that we caught and channeled something quite ancient and genuine and authentically human. Perhaps it was the rewilding theme, this yearning for something more than what the current system offers and how we’re forced to navigate it in order to put food on the table. I hope we managed to show some alternatives or triggered some thoughts around what this culture genuinely has to offer away from the glitz and the glamour, the novelty and the merch. Over the course of the production, I see deep and genuine friendships emerging, bonds forming that in some cases will last a lifetime. Apart from all the wonderful art, a genuinely interested public, the production and partners and all that goes into a Nuart edition, there are aspects of it that we’ll never know, the friendships and narratives and the seeds of ideas that are planted, new relationships to each other and to the world that are formed, this is the real story and value of what we all collectively create. – Martyn Reed, the director and curator of Nuart, on the evolution of Nuart Festival.Text from the Nuart Team More
- in Street Art
“La Guerra Comienza Aqui” by Escif in Valencia, Spain
Street artist Escif created a new intervention in collaboration with the Center Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau. The mural ““La Guerra Comienza Aqui” which translates to “The War Starts Here” focuses on the economic component behind all wars: the military industry has much to gain in a climate of conflict and armed violence, and also has the support of governments and financial entities. The former allocate large budget items year after year to acquire weapons and authorize arms transfers to other countries. The vast majority of banks, for their part, finance weapons production in various ways.“That is one of the interpretation that can be made of this mural: There are always those who profit from conflicts like the one we are seeing in Ukraine,” says the Valencian artist. As an example of this, from the pacifist entity they point out how “in the last week, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, we have seen the stock price of the large arms companies, located almost entirely in Northern countries rise”The mural, which has been painted during the last 3 days of February near the old Fe de València hospital, has as its central figure an enormous cloud of smoke like the one that could be generated by a bombardment in a war context, and on its margins you can read the phrase “the war starts here”.At the foot of the piece, feeding that smoke, we find a bill in flames that, according to those responsible for the mural, can also question at an individual level, because as research by the Delàs Center has shown, the financing of armies and weapons requires taxes paid by taxpayers and bank deposits.“The military path, continuing to spend on weapons and fueling the arms race between countries, can only result in war, never peace. As much as the opposite is repeated to us”, concludes Jordi Calvo, coordinator of the entity.Escif utilizes muted color palettes and straightforward motifs to convert walls around his home city of Valencia and other locations throughout Europe into perceptive ruminations on capitalism, politics, and society. He paints sparse scenes and objects with ties to their environment and current events, often relying on humor and wit to convey an underlying message.Active in the Valencian art scene since the late 1990s, Escif is an internationally recognized artist with interventions in recent years in art centers such as the Power Station museum in Shanghai (China, 2016), the IVAM and the CCCC (Valencia, 2017 and 2020), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2018), and participation in events such as the Biennial of Contemporary African Art (Dakar, 2014), OFF Manifesta X (Saint Petersburg 2014), in the “Dismaland” project organized by Banksy in Weston-super-Mare (England, 2015) or the Lyon Biennale (France, 2019). He too received recognition for the 2020 City Hall Failure, which became symbolic of the fight against the pandemic. More
