Wine and gastronomy will be the main theme of this year’s Colorful City Budapest Festival (Színes Város Budapest Fesztivál). The event offers local and foreign street artists the opportunity to display their skills and talents by creating colorful murals on city’s firewalls in various spots designated for displaying artworks.
The annual event, which was launched four years ago shows that there is a great demand for high quality street art not only among artists but also among the general public said Deputy Mayor Alexandra Szalay-Bobrovniczky at the opening press-conference on Thursday.
The deputy mayor emphasized that Berlin would be the highlighted partner of this year’s festival, and as a result, more German street artists invited to take part in the event.
Colorful City Group
According to the official site, the Colorful City is the first association, which colors public spaces.The civil based project has formed itself to be a movement from the very beginning, because coloring up public spaces in a legal way was unknown before 2008, the time we launched the initiative of Colorful City Project. The basic idea is built on Victor Vasarely’s Colorful City concept, published in 1983, which bottom line is for art to set foot on the streets, public spaces and that people should not only meet with fine art pieces in galleries.
Our lightpainting partner is LaLuz Visuals, our pedagogical partner is PPP.
So far, the Colorful City have colored 15, 000 sqm of wall surface.
Introduction of the problem, possible solutions
The problem at hand is that the city we live in is at many spots grey and alienating. The public spaces are neglected, making it hard to love and protect them. This leads to degradation and depletion. It is easy to see that this way the space loses its public function. We also feel threatened by the fact that almost exclusively advertisements, commercial mediums are the only to color up our every day environment. We live in a web of suggestive, consumer stimulating messages. We would like to form collaboration against these adverts, by which, the interests of the citizens, the city and the private sector could prevail, at least to the extent as it is done now through public space advertising channels.
The areas we choose highly represent the unfolded problems. The group look for neglected arteries of the city with large pedestrian traffic. These are in our main focus, which we would like to color up with contemporary or/and functional pieces of art, making it kinder and nicer for the local community.
The Colorful City strive to change the negligence and disrepair of public spaces, to make it felt: the communities help them to stay nice in the long run.
It was our guideline to use recycled materials and follow sustainability, when creating the artifacts.
The group would also like to change the distorted view on graffiti, by wall paintings with real artistic value, which reflect on everyday issues, technical possibilities and with its colors and meanings, they cheer up the cityscape.
One of our programme’s main features is that it contains interactive elements, so the visitors can influence a picture and send messages.
Thanks to the project, the creations brought art and colors into citizens’ lives. Functional possibilities of art appear through these creations, building a direct connection between citizen and artist.
LONG TERM GOALS
Our long term goal is to make our cities livable, more colorful through the drawing cityscape and to make decision processes regarding townscape more civil and of general interest. Our cities public spaces exist for us. Our vision is to turn Hungary into a huge exhibition space. Let the artifacts of contemporary artists reflect from all of the neglected, grey and filthy surfaces an spaces.
These should be integrated into a specified concept, by having content and creating the lot, unity. we would like to mediate such an awareness/spirituality, which does not approve of an intensifying materialistic, consumer lifestyle, but represents respect and appreciation for nature and humanist values, integrated in everyday life and lifestyle. Let a city guiding system presenting public space art be formed (public and street art guide), which control the enquirers in between different spots of the city, like art sites. By time, this could develop itself to be Budapest’s and other cities’ tourist attraction and could be awarded on an international level.
Execution
According to the official site, long preparatory work was needed to find each particular partner and harmonize their activities.
After agreeing on streams, main principals, and we synchronized our programme’s so far executable plans into a whole. Side by side, presenting our vision on different forums, we gained the support of civil organizations, decision makers and owners of public spaces.
Colorful City artists strongly feel, that authentic, quality documentation and communication from an early start of our work, support the latter developments, co operations.
The group made the public react, we got appreciative feedback of our realized works and gained suggestions for more public spaces to be colored.
Novelty
The Colorful City created public statues by using recycled materials, and also introduced new functions to well known materials, such as concrete, scrap metal or as a matter of fact, simple paint.
Photo: MTI