Street Art Paris’ primary mission is to document and present the work of artists who make use of public space in innovative and positive ways.
Projects
Projects with graffiti artists have always been at the core of the Street Art Paris, erm, project. These range from developing its photographic documentation and interviews archive, through to participating in the cultural institution salon, Culture au Quai; producing a rare collection of artists’ books; curating an art exhibition, workshops and painting performances at a large shopping centre; and designing an artists residency programme and documentary film for a blighted urban area in the Brazilian Amazon.
Salon Culture au Quai
Street Art Paris was invited by Béatrice’s team at the Comité Régional du Tourisme Paris Île-de-France for the salon organised by Les Filles sur le Pont, to join a group of a hundred cultural players made up of theatres, museums, concert halls and heritage organisations at an open air space at Quai de Valmy to present its programming for the season, and hold court with its own art atelier offering five hour-long family workshops by an international bag of artists from Paris, Berlin and Guadeloupe.
Emmaüs refugee centre exhibition
Street Art Paris developed a proposal for Oumar, the manager at the Montmartre Emmaüs refugee shelter, with production support from Charlie Baird, director of Flourescent Smogg (Ralph Steadman, Mear One, Sickboy). The concept involved wall paintings by a line-up of local and migrant artists and a funky-grooves party with fizzy drinks and marshmallow tubes.
Street art tours in France
Street Art Paris developed the first street art tour business in France, which from its launch in 2012 until 2017, served approximately 20,000 French and non-French customers, enabling them to discover an array of different expressions, from street bombing to Banksy, and all shades apart from there. We trained our clientele to adopt a critical-visual-analytical approach, so as to be able interact with any artwork that they encountered, whether that be on the street or in a national art museum.
Manaus Murals public art residency
Nothing like a retelling of the Herzog classic, Fitzcarraldo, Street Art Paris, having found itself on a long ferry ride into the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, decided on constructing a grand vision for the area by teaming up with a Paulistano theatre producer, a local environment journalist and activist, a production crew and a bunch of graffiti artists, to launch an artistic process that will result in the creation of a cohesive series of five murals, made jointly by the artists and by the inhabitants of a community in Manaus. The project intends that the communities can, in addition to beautifying their spaces, find a means of telling their own stories, expressed by painting, as well as facilitating meetings with journalists, writers, poets, photographers, artists and scientists who think about the city today and produce their own art. From this “harvest” of inspirations, artists start to perform painting workshops with the inhabitants of poor communities and they develop the theme, the sketches and the painting of the murals with them. The whole process will also result in a film, an audiovisual work equivalent to murals in their expressive result. The project is currently on hold due to Covid restrictions.
Photocopie N + B artists’ books
Street Art Paris was invited to Bagnolet by OX – a founder member of the impressive 1980s collective, Les Frères Ripoulin – to develop a collective open content collection of black and white artists’ books. Both physical and digital, each zine is the glass of a kaleidoscope giving people different points of view to overlook reality through lines, words and sounds. The project draws attention to imbalances between physical and digital media, individual and collective looks, production and reproduction, value and consumption of art objects. The project’s goal is to create an « archive – kaleidoscope » capable of giving people the possibility to look at reality through the eyes of artists, mixing up different approaches, cultures and sensibilities in a synaesthetic experience, a rhizome whose paper-knots will be the means to link different artists, people, and realities through a multimedia object questioning the place of materiality of an image in the era of digital reproduction of art. It is a photocopied black and white books by artists project, if that was missed.
Mixed-media documentary archive
The years of work that we have invested into amassing a documentary archive of image, video, audio and artefacts from the Parisian and international street art culture is made for the present time, but its benefit is also to posterity, the next generation, or rather, for the kidz. Thus, we jumped at the chance to have our photography used in a secondary school chemistry textbook by a leading French educational publisher to teach the youth and pass on the artist’s understanding of 27,000 years of yantratrific intuitive knowledge and wisdom of metaphysics as is written in the Vedas.
Artist credit: Artiste-Ouvrier (Pierre-Benoît Dumont) at Le M.U.R., Oberkampf.