Part 4: Urban Articulation

In Urban Articulation, the last research field, we gathered examples of creative, voluntary and informal visual articulation in towns.
"If people consider it important at some point in their life to spray I love you on a bridge, that's beautiful. With street art, it is important that you fully believe in what you're doing." Polina Grigoryevna Soloveichik (Toy-shop Collective)
To get a message across, you can choose various formats: copy posters, hand out flyers, preach on beer-crates, talk to friends … But also the cities facades have been functioning as an important display for opinions, political anger and slogans. Nowadays layers and layers of urban articulation peel from house walls in cities less tidy than Amsterdam, overlapping each other and offering an archeology of the city's language. Alongside political announcements and graffiti, more subtle, poetic and artistic forms of signs invade the city. Through work presentations we investigated the origins of street art, its traditions, and what chances it had for survival in such a regulated country.

PRESENTATIONS

SWOON

“Every morning, on my way to work, I greeted a chubby lady who watched me from a house corner. Eventually I went closer, only to discover that this life size woman was hand-cut from a large or maybe many sheets of paper - no lines of a drawing remained. Two years on, a bit washed out, the lady is still there and it still puzzles me how many hours the maker had spent on creating her, to then surrender the paper woman to the circumstances of the street.” Swoon's work of ten attracts attention for the delicacy and uniqueness with which her pieces are made. Her cutouts can be found in the streets of New York, Berlin and many other cities. SWOON spoke about the development of her work.

Toyshop Collective

Originally based in New York, Toyshop Collective is a street art group organising street theatre performances, posters, stickers and drawings. In 2003 the Toyshop Collective won first prize in the competition 'Evolutionary Cells - how do you actively shape your society' with their poster changes. In underground trains in New York and Berlin they replaced commercial advertisements with self-made prints and posters. Leslie Stem and Polina Soloveichik have been traveling in Europe for the last six months, leaving their drawings and portraits in each city they visit. Toyshop Collective spoke about the inspiration to create works for streets and the questions deriving from this practice.

Monika Vykoukal

Monika Vykoukal has been investigating graffiti since 1998. With a background in art history, she has contributed regularly to Graphotism magazine, London, and Springerin, Vienna. She is currently Assistant Curator at Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen, Scotland. As a curator of street-art related exhibitions she collaborated with Banksy and other artists. Monika outlined the historical development of graffiti and presented her own research on street articulation.

Workshop: Decorating Amsterdam by Leslie Stem, Polina Soloveichik and SWOON

“We need your knowledge of places that deserve some celebration. We will create different means of decoration, such as medals or certificates to affix to various locations around the city celebrating places and spaces eg. a particular lamppost with a medal around it. Later in the evening we will go on a tour to hang works and contributions from the open call.”