URB on Tour: Murals and graffiti

URB refers to urban culture; urban relates to a city and paired with culture it is often understood to imply New York's hip-hop culture including (rap) music, (break) dance and (graffiti) paintings, which have since gone their own ways.

Far from New York, we Helsinkians are packing our paintbrushes and sledgehammers and going to the country to create brouhaha and sing and dance. Why? Country people are in fact a minority today, as more than fifty percent of the world’s population lives in cities and towns. Yet in no way does this mean that all city dwellers would be on first name terms with their urban environment or that it would be us who are taking urban culture to the countryside; it will go there anyway.

My starting point for the URB workshops was the idea that the participants should operate in their own environments. The workshop will have to use the local resources and find out what to do with them. At least we will be painting walls: murals and graffiti. Or graffito, as the original Italian word is in singular, meaning ‘a little scratch’ on the wall. Later the word has expanded to imply any writing or painting on a wall. Mural painting, however, is usually considered something apart from graffiti and contains the idea of figurative art. The idea is to combine the figurative and the non-figurative and make it big.

Graffiti is an excellent introduction to visual arts; it starts from the self, from one's own tag, and reaches out to the environment where the painting will be located. Even if you haven’t actually seen a graffiti piece, you still have an idea of what they are or should be like and where. Add the participants’ visually or contentually interesting pictures and voilá, the soup is ready.

Karri Kuoppala
Artist

URB on Tour offers young people an arena for the making of urban art in Central Finland and the regions of Tampere, Oulu and Häme. The project continues the national cooperation between Kiasma and energy company Vattenfall based on social responsibility and targeted at encouraging young people to work together with contemporary art and increasing cooperation between local people and authorities.