OUT OF STH - 2010
The Polish university city of Wroclaw has given over its bleak blank walls to international street artists to decorate, and is enjoying a visitor boom because of it
The Polish city of Wrocław has an historic center as charming as any in Europe, but these days visitors aren’t attracted by the church towers and merchant houses. Rather, it is the bleak walls in the dilapidated suburbs that are drawing attention.
Wrocław has given over its forlorn building flanks as canvases to a cast of international artists, and by doing so it has become an unexpected destination for urban art enthusiasts.
Last Friday (April 23) Wrocław (pronounced Vrotswav) celebrated the opening of Out of Sth, a festival of urban art now in its second year.
With each 
successive event, the city adds dozens of impressive murals to its permanent outdoor collection, which now features works by some of the world’s leading street artists.
The most recognized past participant is Blu, the Italian painter who was featured on the exterior walls of the Tate Modern, and whose time-lapse animations have become an Internet phenomena.
The highlight of the current event is a series of works by Erica Il Cane, another Italian, who paints animals in a style reminiscent of children’s picture book illustrations.
“They’re probably going to see a load of tourists who want to come here, so it’s going to benefit the city,” said Cedar Lewisohn, curator of the Tate’s Street Art exhibition in 2008. Lewisohn was one of the many who attended Out of Sth and was 
impressed by the city’s openness, for even in the age of Banksy street art often struggles to gain official sanction.
“When we did the project in London it was so hard to get all the permissions to paint the walls, with all the regulations and health and safety. It’s a bit more free here,” he said.
Wrocław, once known as Breslau when it was part of the German empire, is a lively city on Poland’s western border that is home to over 630,000 residents, almost one in five of them university students.
Its picturesque old center is surrounded by deteriorating Belle Epoque 
apartment suburbs, mixed incongruously with Communist-era concrete dormitory stacks. The once-handsome streets are in dire need of restoration, and long-promised European Union funding has failed to materialize.
When the curatorial staff at the municipally-funded Gallery Awangada proposed an exhibition of urban art two years ago, local authorities were bemused but open-minded, seeing the initiative as a city beautification project. Now that Wrocław is bidding to become the European Capital of Culture in 2016, the collection of contemporary murals has become a key feature of its candidature.
“We are already seeing that tourists are coming here because they have heard that Blu and Remed painted here. They come to Wrocław with their maps, and they go from wall to wall,” said Joanna Stembalska, one of Out of Sth’s curators.
Alongside Blu and Il Cane, participating artists past and present include Remed, a French painter influenced by typography, the renowned German street tagger Flying Fortress, and Dem from Milan.
Many others are due to participate in the current festival but were delayed by volcano-related interruptions. They will visit Wrocław over the coming weeks; among them are Mudwig from Bristol, SickBoy from London, Zosen from Barcelona and Fefe Telavera from Madrid.
The name of the event is an abbreviation of “out of something,” which was a reference to the extraction of art from the confines of galleries. Nevertheless, the festival also features several gallery exhibitions of poster art by the Polish designer Hakobo and German collagist Thomas Schostok, as well as inflatable constructions by M-City, a Polish installationist.
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On a busy street corner in Wrocław last Friday, two old women paused to allow a dog to ramble in the weeds at the base of a freshly-painted wall. They gazed idly at the design towering above them.
The mural was a storybook rendering of a giant pig playing a squeezebox accordion and gazing skyward, while a sinister wolf lurks behind. The artist Erica Il Cane had subtly worked in existing pinkish-grey hues from the aged wall, as well as a subtextual message about the papacy. To the two elderly observers, it was just a pretty decoration on a drab stretch of the street.
“It’s nice,” said one of the women, wrapped in a headscarf, “It’s better than nothing at all.”
Around the corner, behind a street vegetable market, French painter Jiem was finishing a cheery cartoonish scene of two people holding hands forming a bridge.
“It’s impossible to have this kind of event in France,” Jiem said, “You have so many laws and small rules for nothing. You can’t paint your house yellow if you want. Here they don’t care about it, and they are more open to it. So somehow they are more advanced than us.”
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The official program of Out of Sth runs from now until June 13, but the murals will remain part of Wrocław’s urban landscape indefinitely.
Dem/Ericailcane/Jiem/Vova Vorotniov / Breaking the Wall/ Outofsth.org from Zbiok on Vimeo.
