Kosmopolite Art Tour: in the streets of Utopia

From 2 to 10 July, the Kosmopolite Art Tour will transform the Brussels canal zone into one big canvas, under the auspices of the Farm Prod collective. For extra colour, the Brussels-based gang has invited a batch of spray can wizards.

Whether you consider Utopia a deadening and sterile place where no mystery is left unsolved, or as a place to strive for, a mental landscape that grows more specific with every ambitious attempt to do better, is up to you. We ourselves like to look at it as a land in a parallel universe, never to be colonised, never to be grasped or known completely, but always there, at the back of your mind, as a catalyst for trying, failing, and trying again. An unattainable destination like an unfulfilled desire, it is a dream you dream, not live. A dream that inspires you.

To our mind, it is to this kind of Utopia that Brussels’s Farm Prod collective, to which we owe our refreshing summer covers – along with the Maison des Jeunes Chez Zelle from Louvain-la-Neuve – aspires in the 2015 edition of the biennial Kosmopolite Art Tour, the travelling street art festival of which this year’s central theme is Utopia. “We wanted to involve Belgium’s three main regions: Brussels, Flanders, and Wallonia in one and the same project,” explains Guillaume Desmarets of the Farm Prod collective. “After Brussels, where we’re landing for the third time and will be staging the Belgian scene, from 31 July to 7 August, we head to Louvain-la-Neuve, where the tour already has a history, and after that, from 18 to 20 September, we take to Aalst for the first time. This desire for a trait d’union that stands for a united Belgium might be considered a Utopia, sure, but it’s something we stand by. Incidentally, when you go beyond national borders and look at the world today, Utopia is a very hot topic, as it always used to be and forever will. Nowadays, with all these crises on both an economic and a social level, people need to dream.”

Expect the unexpected
Dreams don’t need mission statements; there are no rules or goals to be set. The success of the Kosmopolite Art Tour, which is taking over Brussels’ canal zone from 2 to 10 July, is intimately linked to its (and Farm Prod’s) identity and foundations: sharing, encounter, forging friendships, tackling projects together, expanding horizons, freeing minds, growing…in short: a true human adventure. “That is what we are about,” confirms Fred Lebbe, another of Farm Prod’s colourful souls. “We’re a collective, we like to work together, it’s the basis of our practice. We like to set up collabs and engage in encounters because they can bring about unexpected things, both on a human and an aesthetic level. The idea behind the Kosmopolite Art Tour is in the same vein: it brings together all these people, young guns, and established street artists, from different generations and different backgrounds, around a common project and 2,000 m² of walls, and is giving the public a chance to see them at work and engage in dialogue with them. The result of this energy will be a surprise, but that’s what makes it exciting.”

And it can grow bigger than expected. The travelling Kosmopolite Art Tour is a spin-off of the Kosmopolite Festival, which was founded in 2002 by the Mac Crew collective. Guillaume Desmarets: “In 2008 we were invited to the festival, and in 2009, together with the Aerosol Bridge Club from Amsterdam, we founded the Kosmopolite Art Tour as a sort of common label. After touring Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam in 2010, the festival also touched ground in Brazil, Morocco, and Indonesia. It has been able to expand internationally and create something incredibly valuable.”

Take it to the streets
These encounters also constitute a large part of the project’s value. The festival is more than street art. There are workshops, concerts and parties, street art tours, film screenings, skateboard and breakdance performances, and an indoor exhibition in which the artists present their works on canvas: “Kosmo Loco” at La Vallée, from 2 to 12 July. But the heart of the festival is to be found along the Akenkaai/quai des Péniches, where, among many others, Sozyone Gonzalez, Eyes-B, Djamel Oulkadi, Steve Locatelli, Hell’o Monsters, Oli-B, Gijs Vanhee, Parole, Denis Meyers, a Squid called Sebastian, and Jaune will paint walls together.

Guillaume Desmarets: “For a whole week, people will be able to see us work, witness the evolution of the murals, start up a conversation. We’re aiming for more than just an aesthetic result.” Fred Lebbe: “Exactly. One of the driving forces of the project is to share our passion and make it accessible. It can lead people to understanding and acceptance. Graffiti always had a bad rep: it was the work of vandals who were occasionally caught and fined. Nowadays street art is looked upon completely differently in the media and is even recouped by gallery holders, politicians, and the advertising world… I understand that the scene, like every other subculture, eventually gets absorbed by mass culture, but you have to maintain some of its essence. It is too easy to say that graffiti is ugly, but street art is fantastic.”

The Farmers attempt to bridge the gap between those two aspects through the Kosmopolite Art Tour. Fred Lebbe: “Though it sometimes feels like we’re doing the splits. [Laughs] After all, the walls we work on here are authorised, part of the city in the same way as the comic strip walls.” Guillaume Desmarets: “Graffiti is about spontaneously, and illegally, appropriating public spaces and walls. The works produced during the Kosmopolite Art Tour are not graffiti, they are frescoes. The authorities often assume that if they make walls available, vandalism will stop. That won’t happen, and we don’t mean it to. The debate is on-going and it is interesting. What we do might lead people to look at the graffiti aesthetic, the mastery of the tags that permeate the city with different eyes.” Fred Lebbe: “That’s where the guided graffiti tours come in. Once you get past the mystery, the spontaneous assumption of degradation and vandalism, you might discover something communal…” Traces of life, in the streets of Utopia.

All photos © Gautier Houba

KOSMOPOLITE ART TOUR
2 > 10/7, Akenkaai/quai des Péniches, kosmopolite.com