Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk at MZM Projects bring us an exemplary profile of the French public art/street artist/fine artist Eltono. A former graffiti writer and semi-professional lounger, Eltono is always experimenting with his own process, hoping sometimes to “facilitate some kind of accident,” say the directors. “He often relies on the roll of a dice, the act that provides the possibility to lose absolute control over the final look of an artwork.”
To continue with MZM Project’s focus on post-graffiti, it is fascinating to imagine this former graffiti writer’s route to get here. Most likely, it was many routes, given his penchant for experimentation.
“Eltono is an amazing narrator, he’s so genuine and true. You just want to listen to it over and over again,” says Borhes.
“You didn’t have a lot of input – and the input you did have had a lot of impact!,” says abstract painter Jeroen Erosie (b.1976, Netherlands) about his beginnings as a graffiti writer in the early 1990s. The revelation of seeing new works in print or on street walls was not something to be taken for granted, as with thumbing through an Instagram feed.
Tracing the evolution of an artist from graffiti writing to personal life and professional art practice – this is what some broadly refer to as Post-Graffiti. With graffiti at its genesis, it is also fascinating to witness how practices and techniques progress in later times at the hand of older practitioners.
Today we have a new documentary that is part of a larger series planned to study just this from a historical, anthropological, and art-historical perspective. Kristina Borhes, one-half of MZM PROJECTS with Nazar Tymoshchuk has been studying and researching in light of our ongoing exploration of post-graffiti – including her white paper Another Attempt to Explore the Transient Nature of Post Graffiti Through the History of a Term.
“We want to discover the stories from artists’ graffiti past and to understand what role it played in the process of forming their artistic practices,” Borhes tells us. ‘Every episode is dedicated to different artists from a particular scene.”
The Ukraine-born/France-based duo of independent researchers and documentarists have had to delay production of this long-planned project due to the ongoing war in their home country, but are proud to have reached this benchmark. This is the first of two completed interviews, but there will be many more if they can follow their planned program.
Ms. Borhes tells us that one of their influences is the work of documentary filmmaker Michael Blackwood, who collected valuable video interviews “with Rothko, Guston, the New York School, and many other artists.” The filmmakers are in awe of the opportunity to study the artist up close without unnecessary packaging, filtering, or attempts to otherwise manipulate the viewer. Borhes says one of the aspects she admired of Blackwood’s earlier documentaries allowed the viewer, “This possibility to see how they talked, to follow their emotions, gestures.”
BSA is proud to premiere this work and series days after its release. Shot and produced in collaboration with last year’s Bien Urbain Festival, this one will be followed by a second interview with street artist/fine artist and master experimenter Eltono.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “Gestures of Caring” Jan Vormann 2. Drones Printing Walls, Stop Us if You’ve Heard This One. 3. Dan Kitchener x Wynwood Walls 2019 4. El Mac: Making a mural of Hope in San Jose 5. Jeff Parker and the New Breed – “Max Brown”
BSA Special Feature: “Gestures of Caring” Jan Vormann
Gestures of Caring
Monuments. Architecture. Mosaics. Street Art.
These interests provided Street Artist Jan Vormann with a launchpad for a cute idea when he began repairing broken walls and filling in street crevices with children’s colorful plastic building blocks. Now along with those miniature interventions he’s added oil stains to his repertoire. He acknowledges the ecological disaster that these gorgeous iridescent patterns imitate, and says somehow these attractive mosaics may start maybe, in the best case, a discussion about it.
Here’s another conversation starter: The outdated and dirty fossil fuel industry continues to spill millions of gallons into our groundwater, streams, lakes, and oceans and has for decades. Also, most wars in this century have been about securing access to oil, or outright stealing it.
Jan Vormann – “Gestures of Caring” Bien Urbain 2019. A film by MZM Projects
Drones Printing Walls, Stop Us if You’ve Heard This One.
Katsu may have started this, or the original developers of a mechanized printer called SprayPrinter, both of whom we published years ago, but now there are other pretenders to the throne, like Urban Flying Opera. Let’s see them hit the high notes!
Dan Kitchener x Wynwood Walls 2019
El Mac: Making a mural of Hope in San Jose
Jeff Parker and the New Breed – “Max Brown”
Time to let go, do a few dance moves, relax and revel into the weekend with some serious masters.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Icy & Sot Overview 2. Imaginary City. Teaser from MZM Projects (UA) 3. “Martha Cooper: Evolucion de una Revolucion” Queretaro, Mexico. 4. Fanakapan x 1UP Crew in Berlin.
BSA Special Feature: Icy & Sot Overview
The Iranian brothers have been toiling and innovating and taking risks on the streets of Tabriz and Brooklyn now for more than a decade. Now commercial brands are discovering them as well. These guys just keep marching forward with purpose, staying true to their beliefs.
Icy & Sot Video Project
Imaginary City. Teaser from MZM Projects (UA)
Entirely of their own volition and vision, filmmakers Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk created this ode to Stavanger and the Street Art festival called Nuart.
Two BSA quickvids in a row here from our recent travels in Berlin and Queretero…
“Martha Cooper: Evolucion de una Revolucion” Queretaro, Mexico.
Urban photographer Martha Cooper now has 101 of her photographs on the streets — literally on the streets of Queretero, Mexico. Part of the Nueve Arte Urbano festival, the exhibition is called “Evolution of a Revolution” and we were pleased to be a part of the opening events with Ms. Cooper, who said she was very pleased with the quality of the large format photos and the reception of the people on the streets.
Thanks to a new big empty city lot this building seems primed for the big stage! First the Alanis angel has ridden on this wall for a long time with grace and beautiful realism. Secondly, Berlin Kidz climbed vertically down from the roof in their distinctive and colorful language.
But we were lucky to see the British Fanakapan working with the worldwide, Berlin-based, anonymous graffiti crew 1UP for a stunning collaboration. This kind of shit can turn you into a fanboy or fangirl in a heartbeat. If you had a heart.
It’s BSA Film Friday! Now we present the best of the year, according to you. We bring you new videos each week – about 240 of them this year. The beauty of the experience is that it can feel quite random and exhilarating – rather like the serendipity of finding new Street Art.
You helped us decide who made it to the top 15 – and we feel proud to see some of these because we liked them too. When we take videos on the road to different cities and countries doing our BSA Film Friday LIVE we also like to share these in classrooms or theaters or lecture halls with locals, students, city leaders. Nothing can beat seeing faces light up, a person thrilled to finally get the sense of something, better understanding the scene, helping people with a new way to look at art in the streets.
The best part is many of these videos encourage you to create, to co-create, to actively participate in public space with meaning and intention. As a collection, these 15 are illuminating, elevating, riveting, strange, soaring, secretly otherworldly, and achingly beautifully human.
Special congratulations go out to artists/directors Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk who landed on the list two times this year, including the number 1 position. Their work is about the intersection of art and theory and life, how to create it, to see it, and how to re-see your world.
We hope you can take some time to enjoy some of the best Street Art videos from around the world and on BSA this year.
“Listen, my only request…. When you’re done doing your thing, do an Italian flag with my daughter’s name on it,” says a guy who is shouting up from the street to the roof where two Hungarian graff writers are preparing to hit a wall with a giant rat in Jersey. That rat looks fantastic as it basks in the blinking glow of the marquee for Vinny Italian Gourmet on the streets in the Newark night below.
That scene alone can stand as their American iconic moment for the US Tapes, but Fatheat and TransOne documented a number of golden moments on their trip this winter to New York, Wynwood, LA, and Las Vegas. Travel with them as they try to square the television mythology of modern America with the one they are encountering in all its ridiculous free-wheeling self satisfied unreflective emotional consumerist funkified freedom*. Standby for sonic blasts from the cultural pulp soundbook and prepare for a celebrity visit.
Slyly they observe and sample and taste and catalogue the insights by traversing the main stage and the margins, smartly not taking it too seriously, finding plenty of places for wide-eyed wonder and wiseguy sarcasm. Steeped in graffiti history with mad skillz themselves, this is all an adventure. Generous of heart, they also share it with you.
“And lost be the day to us in which a measure hath not been danced.”
~ from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra
Every day since the shootings of artists and journalists at the Charlie Hebdo offices on January 14, 2015, dancer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier has made sure to dance for a minute or more. It sounds like a good idea.
“Without editing or effects, in the place and state of mind I find myself that day, with no special technique, staging, clothing, or makeup, nothing but what is there,” she says on her website.
“I dance inside or outside, in public or private places, alone or with others, strangers or people I know, sometimes friends.
I dance as protesters demonstrate, to effect a living poetry, to act through sensitivity against the violence of certain aspects of the world.
This is the solution I found: an action to my own measure, a concrete, repeated action that may redraw lines, disrupt the design, shake up the norms.”
Here she is in Paris on Esperance Street in front of a mural by Street Artist Seth.
All the subversive drama of a terrorist cell, all the color of Mardi Gras, all the pomp and ceremony of an Olympic triathlon. Wielding the long-handled roller like a javelin in the hands of Järvinen, weight lifting multiple backpacks full of paint cans, climbing and jumping walls with speed and dexterity, the 1UP team goes for the gold.
Debuting today on BSA is the flaming new 1UP crew video directed by the ingenious Selina. Slicing the streets with the drone camera like a hot knife through butter, she follows the unruly yet highly organized vandals from overhead in a manner more melodic than menacing as Miles lines up one shot after another in this instantly classic continuous thread of aerosol mayhem.
Passing the aerosol can like a baton, this relay race puts 1UP over the finish line while many rivals would have just blasted out of the blocks. But will those Olympian circles turn into golden handcuffs before the closing ceremony?
A quick overview to catch you up on the 7 most recent pieces attributed to Banksy in Paris. He’s said to be creating work more attuned to the plight of migration, but others have observed it is a return to the classic Banksy sarcastic sweetness that has characterized the clever sudden missives he has delivered since he began. See Butterfly Art News’ coverage here: Paris: Banksy for World Refugee Day
It’s an Italian movie directed by Luchino Visconti in 1960, yes. It is also the name of a crew of Berlin graffiti/installation artists whose satirical interventions play on issues propriety and property – and on social experiments that dupe the media, the public, and banks.
Did they really set up an apartment inside the subway? Is that really the tracks and wall of a metro inside a gallery? Is that Wagner playing in the mobile war arcade set up in the Christmas market? Are those hand grenades being lobbed by children? Is the bank facade blinking red every 20 seconds?
Rocco und seine Brüder (Rocco and His Brothers) have you engaged. Now you have to answer the questions.
The Uruguayan Street Artists/muralist Florencia Durán and Camilo Nuñez are “Colectivo Licuado” and here in the middle of Oviedo in Northern Spain to create a new mural for the Parees fest this September. As is their practice they study the culture that they are visiting and create an allegory that is familiar to the community, if still rather mystical.
In this case they visit Colectivo Licuado & Nun Tamos Toes for a visit of great cultural exchange – sharing sketches, songs, and learning the history of women’s roles in traditional Asturian culture. The resulting mural project is collaborative in nature and powerful in person.
“I pay attention to the intensity of the gaze and the posture, so the passerby is challenged and seeks to question the project.”
A sociological experiment and intervention on the streets by the French Street Artist YZ takes place in Abidjan and camera work in the crowds allows you to appreciate the action on the street. A city of 4.7 million people and the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire, the city has a lively culture of street vending that is unregulated and often populated by children.
YZ speaks with the folks she meets who are vending, who she refers to as “girls” although many are women. Her goal is to better understand them, she says, and to create a Street Art campaign of their portraits.
“I realized that their situation was very different from the men. So I wanted to know more about them. So I started the project ‘Street Vendors’,” she says.
Chernobyl is a nuclear disaster that figures profoundly into the modern age – and for centuries into the future.
Today not so many people talk about this man-made horror that killed a Russian town and chased out its survivors in 1986 just 90 kilometers northeast of Kiev. Called the most disastrous nuclear accident in history, it evacuated 115,000 and spread a radioactive cloud around the Earth, with European neighbors like Scandinavia, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, France and the UK detecting the effects of radiation for years afterward. Three scientists at The New York Academy of Sciences have estimated that over time the number of people killed by effects from the meltdown was almost a million.
Because of the nature of radiation, Chernobyl has been estimated to not be safely habitable for about 20,000 years.
A short documentary today taking us through last autumns On October 7th in Marseille, France in collaboration with Galerie Saint Laurent and Spanish artist Gonzalo Borondo as they presented Matière Noire. A massive collection of individual installations that took over the top floor of an exhibition space normally used for shops, Borondo’s influence in the selections is throughout, a story told in three acts on Projection, Perception and Interpretation.
“When I was just a baby, my Mama told me, ‘Son, always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns.’ But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Johnny Cash sings with some bravado in Folsom Prison Blues on an album released 50 years ago this year. Street Artist Shepard Fairey honors the album and here in Sacramento, California to raise consciousness about the outrageously high rate of incarceration here. “The United States has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of it’s prisoners,” he says, making you question the system in the Land of the Free.
No. 5
MZM Projects – Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk/”Wasteland Wanderers”
This week we feature a couple of new film pieces from the Ukraine based duo of Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoschuk which fairly present an insightful treatise on a particular flavor of Post-Graffiti. Think of it as a two volume textbook and your professors will guide you through the darkness into the light.
A Dilogy.
“The place tells you what to do,” is a poetic and truthful phrase uttered in “Night” on the relationship a vandal has to an abandoned factory, school, home, medical facility; it is spacial and alchemical.
It is also personal, says the female narrator. “The presence of their absence,” is something that every Wasteland Wanderer will be familiar with, the knowledge and feeling that others have been there before you. The work is undeniably affected, even created in response.
“I’ve started a new series called ‘On the Road’ which looks at life behind the scenes in street art culture,” Doug Gillen tells us about this debut episode. Look forward to Doug’s unique perspective on Street Art festivals, art fairs, and studio visits as he expands to the world of urban contemporary.
Not typically who you think of as a Street Artist, here we see Add Fuel and Doug talk about his first book and you see examples of work from this tile maker who infuses traditional Portuguese techniques and pattern making with pop-modern cultural references and cartoon archetypes.
He has a hat, sunglasses, and he has been creating huge black and white photo installations of people wheat-pasted to the sides of buildings for how long? Surprising to us that Jetsonorama is not more of a household name in Street Art circles – his work is solidly tied to biography and human rights, uses his own photography, and routinely elevates humanity – and has been doing it for some time now.
Why isn’t he in huge museum exhibitions?
Today we have a new video giving you a good look at the work and the artist along with the genuine connection and presence that he has with community, taking the time to share their stories.
“The speed of ruin is just something else,” says Street Artist Vegan Flava, and it’s an exasperating realization. Extrapolated to thinking about the enormous war industry, and there is such a thing, you realize that pouring money year after year into ever more sophisticated and destructive weaponry only results in broken bridges, buildings, water systems, vital infrastructure, lives.
Construction, on the other hand, can be arduous and time consuming, takes vision, planning, collaboration, and fortitude. Like great societies.
How quickly they can be eroded, destroyed.
But since Vegan Flava is creating during this destructive enterprise, you get a glimpse into his creativity, and sense of humor. Similarly the psychographics of this story and how it is told reveal insights into the artist and larger themes.
“A drawing, an idea on a piece of paper, can swiftly grow into something larger, thoughts and actions leading to the next. But creating something is never as fast as to tear it to pieces. The speed of ruin is just something else,” he says.
No. 1
MZM Projects – Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk /”Aesthetic of Eas”
“We wanted everything to occur naturally in this movie. We wanted to achieve spontaneity,” say film makers Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoshchuk about their up close look at graffiti writer/abstract painter EAS. In this new film they have captured the creative spirit in action as unobtrusively as they could, allowing the artist to speak – in a way he never does, they say.
Today on BSA Film Friday we’re proud to debut this new portrait by three artists – one painter and two film makers – to encourage BSA readers to take a moment and observe, inside and outside.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. “Aesthetic of Eas” A film by Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoshchuk / MZM Projects
2. 1UP CREW (ONE UNITED POWER) HAPPY NEW YEAR 2018
3. Patrick Hartl & Christian Hundertmark’s Exclusive Debut of “Layer Cake”
BSA Special Feature: “Aesthetic of Eas” A film by Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoshchuk / MZM Projects
“We wanted everything to occur naturally in this movie. We wanted to achieve spontaneity,” say film makers Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoshchuk about their up close look at graffiti writer/abstract painter EAS. In this new film they have captured the creative spirit in action as unobtrusively as they could, allowing the artist to speak – in a way he never does, they say.
Today on BSA Film Friday we’re proud to debut this new portrait by three artists – one painter and two film makers – to encourage BSA readers to take a moment and observe, inside and outside.
The directors spoke with us about the making of the film, how they developed it, and how EAS works as an artist;
BSA: Can you talk a little about EAS and his painting history and what your connection to his work is? Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoshchuk: Eas started to paint graffiti in 2003. It was a classic graffiti, or at least “as classic as it could be” in Central Ukraine during early 2000’s.. He was truly addicted to lettering for more than decade, but then he started to feel entangled by the letters. Eas was confused by the the meaning of the letters, since all he wanted to do is to play with a shape, but not with the meaning. It was the moment when he made the step forward non-representational painting and became the part of East-European post-graffiti scene.
We’ve met Eas at “Black Circle” Festival in August 2015. It was a significant event for graffiti writers and graffiti-associated abstract painters, therefore we were doing our “field research” about the scene there. Even though, we were familiar with the style of Eas through the online platforms, it was the first time we saw him during the process of creation. At that moment, standing at the bottom of the swimming pool of abandoned Soviet health center and watching how the paint is splashing on the wall yet obeying the artist’s gesture; hearing the spray-can scratching the surface in order to make the finishing lines; experiencing the energy of desolated place released by Eas… At that particular moment we clearly decided that someday we will do the movie about this man. Probably, in his art, in his way of work, in his attitude and approach we felt the truthfulness which is unfortunately very rare in today’s urban and contemporary art.
BSA: How did you decide on the pacing of the film, which seems like it is suspended in a honey-like substance. KB and NT: Yeah, that was pretty much the idea. We wanted to create the feeling as if the time slows down. During those 15 minutes of film the audience should simply follow the tone of voice and deepen into the lines, the shapes, narration, to feel the depth of every word. Most likely, it’s just the way we experience the art of Eas by ourselves. If you will look at some of his artworks for a certain time you will feel how the image slowly absorbs you. We aimed to share this experience and the atmosphere which actually couldn’t be the same without the perfectly convenient soundtrack written by Berlin-based artist Shunsuke Hatori and performed by his band “SINSENSA”.
BSA: Did know that EAS was so verbally illustrative when describing his process before you began filming? KB and NT: Actually, we’re pretty sure that most of the people who know Eas in real life would be quite surprised by the openness of his narration. Eas is not much of a talker, he’s that type of the person who prefers to stay aside, alone with his thoughts and only the closest people around. Before the filming we thought that it’ll be our main challenge, well even Eas was thinking that way. Although, we believe that everything depends on the moment and the right approach. We spent a few days with Eas talking from morning till late night, we’ve met his family and even visited his grandmother. Our recorded interview lasts for almost 7 hours in overall. Frankly saying, it was an amazing experience and the real “hidden jem”. All that we wanted is to have the life talk and not the text prepared in advance. We were asking the hundreds of questions and he just had to answer it freely. That was the principle for this film. We wanted to have the spoken “flow”, just as he has it in painting. But we didn’t even expect that the “flow” will appear to be so candid, open and so truly poetical.
BSA: “When I feel good about the place it means the piece will be more accomplished. More complete” he says in the film. How did you and EAS locate the right location to do his work, and was it difficult to respect his space? KB and NT: This question hits straight to the point. To respect the space and not interfere with the “energy” between the wall and the artist during the painting process appeared to be our biggest challenge. We knew Eas and how sensitive he is regarding the “spiritual” part of the process. He will never tell that you’re distracting him, but it surely will affect the painting. None of us wanted it to be this way. That’s why it required the certain effort and respect from the both sides. Each of us did our best in order to keep the process as natural as it could be. And it seems like the spirit of the wall let us to capture the magic.
We wanted everything to occur naturally in this movie. We wanted to achieve spontaneity. Therefore, the searching for locations probably was the most interesting part. Together with Eas we were like stalkers, riding in the car through the forests, fields and villages around Kremenchuk city in search for a “zone”, a very special place which could be felt only by him.
“Aesthetic of Eas” is represented as an abstract in 5 sections. Each section (except the fifth, because it contains only artworks, not the process) is visualized by the different location and the fresh artwork in there.
First section “Place” was filmed in the village Andriyky, the village where the ancestors of Eas were living. His grandma still lives there, even though the place is almost a ghost village, only a few people are living there now. Most of the houses are abandoned. There are a lot of artworks made by Eas there. This place is exceptionally special for him.
This year Eas had a special birthday gift in early October. He was hang-gliding over the fields near the city. From the sky he saw the abandoned building in the middle of the field. Surely, he wanted to discover it. This is what he proposed us to do together. After the long journey through the forest and fields we found this mysterious building. It was the abandoned airport Nedogarki. This place definitely has a character and Eas was so excited that he did two artworks there. “Wall”, the second section of the film shows the indoor artwork and the forth section “Line” is visualized by the outdoor artwork of abandoned airport.
The place for the third section “Color” appeared accidentally in the middle of our journey around Kremenchuk. Eas noticed the concrete walls surrounded by the trees near the cornfield. It was a good example how places are finding him by themselves.
BSA: It looks like he creates some of his his own art instruments. What did you learn from watching his rhythm of painting and splattering and splashing color? KB and NT: Yeah, he’s very passionate about the new things and methods. The way how Eas works with the paint is truly mesmerizing. This is the main reason why we wanted to make a movie about him so badly. You just have to see it. The gesture, rhythm, concentration… As if he is a shaman during some mysterious ritual. At that moment you really start to think about spiritual, about the “inner necessity”, or “infinite abyss”, about expression over illustration and everything you’ve ever heard about the abstract.
Although, the most important thing is that he’s doing it not because he studied Kandinsky or Pollock, but because it really comes from the inside. You can say it by watching how purely spontaneous he is during the process of creation. Unlike the many urban and young contemporary artists Eas doesn’t do it as symbolic effort of made-up resistance, neither as pathetic attempt to proudly decorate another forsaken white cube, he just doing it, because he simply cannot not to do.
New Years celebrations in Berlin are unlike most other cities – with people exploding fireworks literally all over the entire city for hours. To add to the festivities the 1UP crew also added their own adornment to the trainline, in the middle of all the revelers and explosives.
Patrick Hartl & Christian Hundertmark’s Exclusive Debut of “Layer Cake”
The dynamic duo of Patrick Hartl & Christian Hundertmark have developed an artistic dialogue based in large part on a process of art-making that they discovered together.
Derived from the street practice of “going over” – which is normally looked upon as one artist dissing another – the two graffiti/Street Artists have refined the practice and turned it into a form to celebrate, to study, to appreciate, and turn on its head.
In this short teaser “Layer Cake” explains how it is made and gives a hint at a promising future for the artists who have challenged themselves to create something new together. We are sure there is much more to come!
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
