Kitchener & Carhartt present:
URBANSKILLS - Experimental Street Art Festival
REITSCHULE BERN, 6. - 8. JUNI 2003
Produced by CUE, Boombox.net & Otravez
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Walls sprayed with graffiti, is something you cannot think away from today’s cities. It is interminably linked with urban life. Influenced by their surroundings, images appear, which, in turn put distinctive marks on their environment. If you travel the same journey on bus or train every day, you begin to notice, how many such sprayed pieces there are and how they change surprisingly frequent in some places. In the last 10 years a lot has changed visually; there’s a lot more styles of graffiti for one. There are artists that create a style so distinctive; it is immediately recognisable.
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At the same time, we witness an increased merging of graffiti and graphic design. Graffiti does no longer just appear on city walls; but also on flyers, magazine covers and illustrations, -commercial and non-commercial. It is an art form, gaining increasing recognition. Naturally, the use of computers again spawns new styles. Publications like Blower, Scrawl, Souvenirs de Paris, Futura, etc. are good documentations of such developments. Artists like Futura2000 have proven with their work; that Graffiti is an art form that stands on firm ground also within the contemporary art context. This year, Hamburg has been host to the «Urban Discipline» exhibition for the third time. Urban Discipline is one example of exhibitions worldwide that shows new works by a selection of international artists. Graffiti art quite obviously is no longer «simply» a youth-culture phenomenon.
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As part of the four elements of hiphop culture – dj, mc, break-dance and graffiti – graffiti artists have been working closely with musicians from the start: at first limited to a hiphop context, later expanding to other musical styles. The most prominent example for the collaboration between music and graffiti is again Futura’s work for MoWax and DJ Krush.
The influence of this so-called «street culture» increasingly expands into ever more areas: fashion, music, art, film and more. Skateboarding, snowboarding, graffiti and the many hybrids in between have become so important, that one cannot any longer speak of youth-culture, without mentioning them. What used to be strictly «underground» today is often «mainstream». Global exchange and collaboration between artists with a «street» background, has created a worldwide art form, which has become an integral part of our cultural agenda.
On the weekend of the 7th and 8th june 2003 we held an event in the big hall of the Reitschule in Bern. This event was devoted to the cultural phenomenon described above, focusing on the urban aspect, respectively on the interaction between urban surface and the artist. Graffiti artists were not painting on real city walls but on projected walls (b/w slides) of pictures taken in cities throughout the world. The virtual nature of the projected walls stood as a synonym for the global dimension of this urban art form.
There were also movie screenings, showing different aspects of street culture.
©Photos: Raffael Waldner
Further information: www.urbanskills.ch
