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.
Starting from the framing of the railway arches, the festival conquers the surrounding street space and transforms it into an urban garden landscape. In the form of a nearly three-month-long real laboratory of urban art and research, CityLeaks explores the potentials of public space, its streets, green and open spaces. Playing with invisible spaces, CityLeaks explores the all-too-obvious urban contexts it addresses in the 2021 program year. Climate justice and urban resilience are central motifs of the artistic and exploratory negotiation of public space. The program-closing CityLeaks Academy will open up a space for collaborative reflection that will stage its findings in urban micro-utopias.
