The 7th edition of the RUA Mural Festival arrives in Estonia’s Elva Municipality, changing the visual landscape of Elva and five surrounding villages: Rõngu, Annikoru, Valguta, Puhja, and Aakre. Running from May 27th to June 1st, this annual event brings together a diverse group of artists from various corners of the world to create murals that play to the tastes and everyday surroundings of the local communities.
This year’s festival features an impressive lineup of muralists, including Lily Brick from Spain, Pablito Zago from France, Ola Kalnins from Sweden, Viktoria Berezina from Ukraine, and several local artists such as Greete Okas and Robin Nõgisto from Estonia, as well as Karolis Desutaje and Tadas Vincaitis from Lithuania. These artists, each known for their distinct styles and illustrative techniques, reflect a broad spectrum of artistic perspectives and cultural backgrounds.
Organized by the Elva Municipality in collaboration with the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the European Capital of Culture Tartu 2024, the Embassy of Spain, and the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania to the Republic of Estonia, the RUA Mural Festival is not only about improving urban spaces. It emphasizes community engagement, with activities including a youth camp for local Estonians and Ukrainians, and a community wall painting workshop. These initiatives aim to foster a deeper connection between the artists and the residents, ensuring that the murals resonate with and reflect the local culture and environment.
In its commitment to accessibility and inclusivity, the festival has also incorporated art into social facilities over the years, including schools, orphanages, and care centers. This year’s program continues this tradition, ensuring that art’s transformative power reaches all community members. The RUA Mural Festival thus stands out for its artistic excellence and dedication to making art an integral part of everyday life in Estonia’s small towns.
In the quiet embrace of rural Estonia, street artists find a harmonious refuge. With the century’s turbulent past, its break with Moscow in the 90s and its joining with NATO and the EU in the 2000s, Estonia today enjoys political stability, economic growth, a thriving tech sector, and a progressive social welfare that enhances the
In the quiet embrace of rural Estonia, street artists find a harmonious refuge.
With the century’s turbulent past, its break with Moscow in the 90s and its joining with NATO and the EU in the 2000s, Estonia today enjoys political stability, economic growth, a thriving tech sector, and a progressive social welfare that enhances the well-being of the average Mari and Jaan. As with most European and American cities, there is an established or burgeoning street art and graffiti scene, with a healthy representation of the styles and techniques interpolated through a local lens, and the reverberations of pop satire, Bansky humor, and certain anarchic stencibilites on streets. Since 2018, the mural aspect of the street art movement has traveled to rural areas as well via the Rural Urban Art (RUA) Festival in small villages to bring people out of their homes to engage in a public art that is new and unusual to many.
This June, artists from Estonia and eight other countries spread out across small villages of Viljandi municipality whose populations range from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand to introduce aesthetics and sensibilities emanating from more heavily populated areas, now firmly in new contexts. “Many local people saw such action for the first time and all the while, the feedback and emotions were so highly positive,” says Salme Kulmar, the creator of the festival, “It’s a sign that visual art also belongs to small towns and that there is actually a need for it!”
Like the Fanzara Miau Mural Festival in Spain and the Utsira project on an island of 200 inhabitants in Norway, the efforts of RUA organizers are focused on smaller audiences than a typical festival, yet the impact of art on the streets can be as profound as the splashy commercial ones in London, Montreal, or Brooklyn. Each edition of the festival has been staged in different areas, earning RUA the distinction of calling itself a nomadic street art festival. The scale can be small or larger, like the 86 meter mural by Ukrainian artist Andrey Kovtun this year.
There’s something about the feedback here that seems to resonate on a deeper, individual level.
“Throughout the festival we felt a lot of love from the locals,” says Kulmar of the various artists interactions with neighbors and families. Among the accounts, residents of one building cooked lunch for the Italian artist daily while he worked, some locals in Päri village hosted a celebration for Ukrainian artist Andrey Kovtun, and a final celebration including a smoke sauna invited all the artists to the home of Ulvi Tatar in Kolga-Jaani village.
“It was a week full of love,” says Kulmar. And murals of course.
Artists of RUA 2023 included: Andrey Kovtun, Luogo Comune from Italy, Peter Skensved (Denmark), Myforestbridge from Ukraine, Maxime Ivanez and Annabelle Tatto from France, Pidžin from Lithuania, Maikki Rantala from Finland, Uneg from Mexico, Karolis Dezute from Lithuania, Andrey Kovtun (Ukraine).
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