STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

ANNEX 2 - SECTION H:
STREET ARTS IN EUROPE: MEANS OF DIFFUSION
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Street Artists in Europe
Contribution by Anne Tucker – January 2007 – in the framework of the study “Street Artists in
Europe”
1. The context in which street arts are being presented
It is clear that the vast majority of street arts presentations across Europe take place within the
context of a festival or special event. There are many different reasons for this:
• Economic: street arts festivals are seen in many places as opportunities to drive tourism and
inward investment to towns and small cities. A far greater impact can be made by bringing a
number of different companies together at the same time, to change the atmosphere entirely
from the day to day to something exhilarating and unusual; increasingly large numbers of
visitors are attracted and a significant amount of income accrues to the local economy - hotels,
shops, restaurants, bars, car parks and public transport, local services and others.
• Civic Pride/Marketing: tourism is a crucial element in a place’s view of itself – many tourists
will return home and speak highly of the place, if they have had an enjoyable time. Festivals
encourage tourism, towns are ‘on show’ for the visiting public. This is particularly strong in
street festivals across Western Europe, where France, Spain, Belgium and Holland have been
championing their street festivals for over 20 years.
• Political: in some areas (particularly in France) street festivals have been virtually ‘adopted’
by local elected politicians as examples of their successful managing of their town, of doing
things that appeal widely to their electorate in a truly open and democratic way.
• Funding – funding structures in some countries are organised such that it is much easier to
raise money to run a specific event than to organise a long season or an annual programme.
Several respondents described that funding was available for festivals to pay for artists but not
for artists to fund themselves.
• Social Inclusion Agendas: this is becoming more significant in parts of Europe, where
democratising of culture is seen desirable and arts on the streets are accessible to all and
designed to cross cultural and age barriers (in a world that seems to be becoming successively
more segregated and compartmentalised, whether by culture, interest, class or religion). In
Germany this extends to cultural democracy – as theatres are embracing a street arts model as a
way to encourage audiences back into the theatre.
1.1. Dedicated Street Arts festivals
There are a very large number of street festivals across Europe. Every country in the EC holds at
least one festival that features street artists alongside indoor performing or visual or multimedia
arts; a few countries do not have a festival dedicated purely to street arts, but around half have
more street festivals than they could count easily, with new ones added every year. France has
many more street festivals than any other European country and the scale and ambition of some
of the festivals there is impressive.
PE 375.307