Editions

Back to the hood! For its sixth edition, the otherwise so bustling CityLeaks Urban Art Festival returns for the first time to its past program location. Titled "Simul et Singulis" ("be together and be yourself"), CityLeaks invites the public to appropriate the existing festival architecture in the vacant railway arches in Cologne´s quarter of Ehrenfeld. Appropriate and create! True to the guiding principle of the "Common Space", a space by and for all is created in the densifying neighborhood. A space that is aware of the history of its location and that develops ideas for its future. Workshops, exhibitions, interventions and events reveal the diversity of Cologne's urban culture.

For its fifth edition titled "re:public” the CityLeaks Urban Art Festival retraces the where from? and where to? of urban change in Cologne-Ehrenfeld. It delves into the microcosm of two dialectically opposed streets in Cologne´s popular district: the empty space of Hüttenstraße and the densifying Lichtstraße. Artistically explorative and intervening, CityLeaks explores the circular relationship between identity and memory, between the use of open space and urban displacement, elevating “the street” to the protagonist of the festival. For streets, as Walter Benjamin once put it in his texts on cities and architecture, "are the dwellings of the collective. The collective is an eternally awake, eternally moving being that experiences, realizes and conceives as much between the walls of buildings as individuals do in the shelter of their four walls."

How much too little is enough?
How much having is being?
How much more is enough?

In 2017, the already fourth edition of the biennial City-Leaks Urban Art Festival is primarily concerned with the sharing city, the "Sharing Cities". For almost an entire month, the age-old question that already troubled the inhabitants of Uruk will be examined under the influence of contemporary demands: What makes a city livable? How do we want to live?

The CityLeaks Urban Art Festival was brought to life through a desire to demonstrate that public space belongs to all of us and that we, as inhabitants of this city, should demand more rights and involvement in the decision making and creative processes that shape it.