STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

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Street Artists in Europe
public into a major aesthetic challenge. Yves Deschamps, an established street performer in
France, puts it pragmatically: ‘All forms of studies, whether quantitative or qualitative, are
justifications for getting hold of (…) means to be put at the disposal of the artists so that they
can meet the public that is not mentioned, that is not quantified, that is to say around 80% of the
population!’ 326
Street arts pose the acute question of winning over those who are excluded from art and culture,
known as the ‘non-public’. ‘The underlying question in Europe is how to stay in touch with
others’. 327 Jean-Raymond Jacob, artistic director of the Oposito company, points out that the
main purpose of circulating art works remains the artists’ profound desire to go in search of
other people, to listen to them and communicate with them through art. How do street arts, by
shifting the territory of art, help reduce the artistic and cultural gap from which all the peoples of
Europe suffer?
For street artists, occupying the public space is a vital aesthetic choice, a means of engaging
with the people. At European level, there is not just one public space, there are many public
spaces. There are striking disparities between them, and the way artists use the public space and
their relationship with it differ fundamentally between, for example, Catalonia and Austria. That
inevitably results in different practices and audiences. In Spain the streets are quite definitely
alive. Festivals, religious processions, secular and religious feasts offer many pretexts for taking
to the street. Javier Martinez, artistic director of the Teatro y Artes de Calle (TAC) festival of
Valladolid, is attempting to replace these strictly circumscribed forms of animation with the
dissemination of contemporary creative works. ‘The street is an open physical space, a public
space that can be occupied by art forms that address the public in a different way. The street is a
particularly interesting frontier zone, for it allows us to speak about our relationship to the town,
the relationship of life to the town’ 328 .
With the creation of ‘Roman Summer’ in the mid-1970s, the streets of Rome suddenly attracted
millions of inhabitants for whom the town had become synonymous with fear following the
difficult years of terrorism. Roman Summer became a pioneering artistic and cultural event that
led the population of the Italian capital to reclaim the public spaces. Another example is
Romania, which has a different history, a different legacy. Even today, making use of the public
space remains a delicate matter because it remains a symbolic space to be occupied following
the recent years of dictatorship. It is within that contrasting landscape of physical and symbolic
public spaces that European audiences for street arts can be identified.
2. An issue with global connotations
2.1. The diversification of audiences
2.1.1. Common trend: homogenous audience
The question of street arts audiences in Europe cannot be isolated from the far wider question of
audiences for culture and live performance. Thanks to the surveys of cultural practices, habits
and behaviour that a great many European countries have been conducting since the 1970s, we
326
Ibid., p. 112.
327
Jacob, Jean-Raymond, quoted in Vernis, Dominique, ‘La ville charnelle’, Rue européenne, op. cit. (no page
numbers).
328
Martinez Javier, quoted in Martin-Lahmani Sylvie, ‘Territoires: rue, Europe, monde’, in In Situ, Voyages
d’artistes européens, col. Carnets de Rue, L’Entretemps, 2006, p. 13.
PE 375.307