Street art

[Note: these images are from my gap year in 2013, which I spent trawling the art galleries of Europe and taking lots of photos of artworks that I liked. Over the past summer I have organised+compiled all of these. By doing so and uploading them here I’m hoping to find connections and identify common elements, creating a record of the things I felt drawn to and inspired by.]
Amsterdam:

Basel:

Paris:

Barcelona:

Aaand the winner is… Valencia:

Street Art Valencia facebook page
Interview with Valencia street artist ESCIF

Of course graffiti is a viable tactic for engaging the public sphere. I see graffiti as a necessary symptom of life in contemporary cities. A painted wall represents a way of using the city that is not thought about socially (though it becomes more so every day). It seems very interesting to me that people that live in a city do not settle for using it according to imposed rules; they invent new ways of utilizing it. It seems of equal validity to me to paint a wall, to put on a party in a plaza or to organize a brunch on a rotunda. There exists a collective social ethic that makes us understand a tag on a dumpster as a sign of vandalism while a McDonalds stuck in the historical center of the city is seen as a sign of progress.