STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
The majority of partnerships have been established with different local institutions and
associations as well as with other non-profit associations. Sometimes as a result of the
differences of terminologies in the diverse countries, these two types of partnerships can overlap
one the other. Partnerships with the local municipality and with the inhabitants (or their special
associations) are still very prevalent. The relatively weak performance of relationships with
state-level and international organisations show that street art events have more interests in
local, social cooperation and have in general less influence on a the national or international
level.
Another question interested about the special relationship between street art events and the local
municipality. It intended to reveal whether artists and organisers can count on any specific
support from the latter. In the majority of cases, municipalities do give free technical support for
street art events: light, sound system, etc. It also helps to obtain in an easier and quicker way the
permits needed from other authorities and particularly the police prefecture. There are however
exceptions of this positive engagement of municipalities. In Germany, municipality only
supports the street art event if it is financed by public founds. If it is a private event, it has to pay
for all technical services. In the United Kingdom, local municipalities give no help to street art
events. As the art director of Manchester International Arts mentioned: ‘You have to pay in
Manchester!’
Most typically in East-Central Europe, street art events are often in conflict situation with local
municipalities. The case of the New Theatre Institute of Latvia has already been quoted. Sziget
festival in Budapest also had to face similar problems with the conservative-led local
municipality that wanted to prohibit the festival giving place to events initiated by the gay
communities. As already mentioned above, in this part of Europe street art events are still often
treated as dangerous for public security and public order…
4. Impacts of street arts on the city
The third group of questions invited interviewees to evaluate the most important effects played
by their spectacle or event on the city. Four main topics were determined: spatial, social,
cultural-organisational and economic effects. Within all groups several sub-types have been
proposed. After all queries concerning the different effects, a special question has been added in
order to know whether those had been identified as primary, direct influences, figuring between
the objectives of the event, or if they were just secondary, complementary ones.
4.1. Spatial effects
The main difficulty of this series of questions was that although the following terms of urban
development are used in everyday language, their exact meaning is not always clear for
someone who is not specialised in the subject. Therefore when analysing the answers, we
carefully read the short texts (if there were any), written by the interviewees, and decided
according to our knowledge to which group of spatial effect these could be integrated. In this
way we obtained a maybe more subjective but hopefully more correct result. Spatial effect is
between the main objectives of almost one third of the events (table 7).
‘Creation of public spaces’ signifies in this context if the event contributes to the creation or the
changing of functions in a part of an area by creating a new public space, labelled by the event.
For instance, the occupation and the use for new purposes of an industrial building can be
mentioned in this group.
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PE 375.307