Manifesto

Way out to the city

Moscow is changing rapidly – it is easy to spot, how the city becomes more convenient, more interesting, more modern, approaching the degree of saturation and the quality of cultural life to other cities. Now there are a lot of new festivals and cultural projects held in Moscow, the urban parks are regularly updated – and it all helps our capital and our people to understand the city we live in today, its character, its future.

Street art is also included in this process, and it is an inevitable step. Street art, “street graphics” is no longer a marginal and illegal art. It had become one of the main means of expression for subculture movements (punk, hip-hop, etc.) in the 70s, and it also had become an important and one of the most dynamic elements in the art by the end of the century. Nowadays museums organize exhibitions of works of this genre, and the street art is considered as an essential of the culture of cities.

In modern city street-art lives an active life, a lot of gorgeous works are unauthorized, but, still, formal interaction between government and artists helps to solve many problems: design of streets, social advertising, ennoblement of abandoned areas, the development of culture, creating a space of self-expression of young artists, creating connection between people and their city, its history and its mood. This is also an element of culture, which causes great interest among tourists and which works on city’s image.

In Moscow we already have artists and experience in the use of street art for solving urban problems. Since 2009, more than 1,500 objects of the Department for Fuel and Energy Economy of Moscow Government have been painted, and also Moscow Street-Art festival MOST has been successfully held 2 years in a row. This year, artists have decorated 150 objects with their works within the graffiti-project of Festival “The best city in the world”, held by Department of Culture of Moscow. Street-art has become part of the cultural programs of Winzavod CCA, design Centre Artplay, “Flacon” design-factory.

The experience gained allows moving on to more systematic work with this area of culture. The primary goal of street-art forum MOST is to acquaint all stakeholders with a potential of street-art in the system of the modern city. Forum participants –representatives of government and business, artists and curators – will give answers to the important questions: which role street-art can play in Moscow today, which surfaces and areas are in need of street-art and in which form of street-art they are in need, how the city authorities, curators and artists should work together. The result of Forum will be the following: all participants – people, on whom depends the development of street-art and the changes in the city - will get a common understanding of the direction, in which street-art should move.