{"id":2528,"date":"2014-12-30T12:07:59","date_gmt":"2014-12-30T11:07:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/difusor.org\/?p=2528"},"modified":"2014-12-30T12:10:58","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T11:10:58","slug":"an-open-walls-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/difusor.org\/es\/2014\/12\/30\/an-open-walls-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"An Open Walls movement?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In answer to RJ Rushmore post \u201cWhat and where are open walls?<\/a>\u201d here\u2019s my point on the open walls issue.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to focus on major cities, mainly Barcelona, my hometown.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t talk about smaller ones, such as Terrassa (200K people, 30 min from Barcelona, with a good set \u201320 exactly- of completely free walls<\/a> available for everyone, without any application or selection process) or Valencia (1M people, Escif\u2019s hometown and where common sense seems to dominate street life and allow a lot of art to be placed on walls, just by talking to building owners.<\/p>\n

I also think of some south american cities, such as Buenos Aires, with a pretty organic way of functioning in the streets. Artists just choose places where they don\u2019t bother anyone or directly ask the owner to paint with any problem.<\/p>\n

These two situations are similar to what was happening in Barcelona in the late 90\u2019s. graffiti was not legal but it was not prosecuted (well, if you were not tagging a police car\u2026), untill the law changed at the end of 2005. By 2006, the entire city was buffed, people was being highly fined and graffiti \/ street art scene was heavily wounded, having to move to the outskirts and forget to paint nice murals downtown.<\/p>\n

But focusing in this zero tolerance context, shared by most cities worldwide, yet by 2008 we were running the first \u201copen wall\u201d in Barcelona, thanks to having done a stencil festival (Difusor2007<\/a>) and used that specific wall for artistic purposes. This very first project, named Galeria Oberta<\/a> (Open Gallery) allowed anyone to download an authorisation and paint at the spot, 24\/7, anonymously (only the user has got the personal data, whilst cops, authorities and ourselves as organisers get only a notification that an intervention will be done at a certain date. The rest of the data is encrypted and stored).<\/p>\n

After shutting this project we started openwalls.info<\/a>. Same philosophy, with more spots and the will to grow along the city.<\/p>\n

From 2007 we got in touch with other people that were having similar ideas: Tristan Manco invited us to join Banksy\u2019s Cans festival, well known for the artworks of its two editions (stencils and graffiti) but less by what I believe is another important thing about that festival \u2013beside being front cover of The Times-: set up the first free legal wall in London, still working in Leake St. Also swiss based legal-walls.net<\/a>, which was only an open database of available spots, and sometimes not fully reliable, but still a good guide for painting legal almost anywhere; Le Mur<\/a> in Paris was active, but not open. Pedro Soares<\/a>, who started independently a good project in Lisbon, GAU<\/a>, now in the hands of the Mayor\u2019s Office but still doing quite a good job, sometimes in collaboration with Vhils related Underdogs<\/a> gallery. Also Marcus Willcocks and Lorraine Gamman at the DACRC<\/a> (University of the Arts London) have been (and still are) doing a long term research on how to deal with the graffiti issue. Devon Ostrom<\/a>, in Toronto, showing, here<\/a>, how independent public art can be founded through a tax on outdoor advertising. And many other efforts I know less well, for example in Sydney, Australia.<\/p>\n

In the first edition of the Openwalls Conference –2011<\/a>–\u00a0 we tried to gather some of these people (Zaragoza\u2019s Asalto have an openwalls like program<\/a> since then, so does another local organisation in Barcelona), and set the basis for upcoming conversations.<\/p>\n

The same have been doing people at DAC, with the Graffiti Dialogues<\/a> and the Graffiti Sessions<\/a> (having GSA<\/a> crew giving a hand to paint some walls on this last remarkable event).<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s this same spirit we seeked with the second edition of the Openwalls Conference (2014<\/a>): putting to work up to 40 public workers from the Barcelona City Hall in a workshop on independent artistic interventions, in a series of public talks with festival promoters such as Monica Campana from Living Walls<\/a>, Teresa Latuszewska-Syrda from Urban Forms<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n

So, yes, it\u2019s difficult to paint in highly regulated cities, but there are starting to appear some chances thanks to the work of small organisations that are working as a hinge between artists and public policy makers. Obviously, we are far from having the work done, but seeds are there.<\/p>\n

The next challenge is not only to make a manifesto, but to settle down a fair modus operandi for artists, developers and public space itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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In answer to RJ Rushmore post \u201cWhat and where are open walls?\u201d here\u2019s my point on the open walls issue. I\u2019m going to focus on major cities, mainly Barcelona, my hometown. I won\u2019t talk about smaller ones, such as Terrassa (200K people, 30 min from Barcelona, with a good set \u201320 exactly- of completely free …<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2529,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[103,58,75,81,11,71,43],"class_list":["post-2528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lab","category-laboratory","tag-art-urba","tag-barcelona","tag-espai-public","tag-festival","tag-galeria-oberta","tag-openwalls","tag-text","entry-lead"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/difusor.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/difusor.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/difusor.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/difusor.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/difusor.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2528"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/difusor.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2532,"href":"https:\/\/difusor.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2528\/revisions\/2532"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/difusor.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/difusor.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/difusor.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/difusor.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}