“Slowly and steadily, the city seems to be consuming itself, even as it remains.”
(Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things, London, 1987, p. 21)
The festival title „Die Stadt, die es nicht gibt“, suggests the possibility of an urban utopia, one that is based on the fact that spaces are being produced rather than being given. International artists who work with different aspects of the city, space and society will explore the urban realm of “Cologne”.
Being the central program element of the art and research project [re/dis]cover, the TRANSURBAN Urban Art Archive opened its 9th chapter in and about Amsterdam in spring 2019.
In September 2017, the fourth edition of CityLeaks Urban Art Festival, entitled “Sharing Cities”, set out to explore the public space of Cologne’s northern city centre around Ebertplatz. Its activities focused on a variety of possibilities for rethinking and re-enacting urban environments as common spaces.
On the occasion of its fifth edition the CityLeaks Urban Art Festival elevates the "street" to its protagonist – the street as a place for discovery and encounter; as a potential heterotopia, as one of these ‘other spaces’ whose subversive power enables art not only to come up with, but also to realize utopian alternatives to a normed public space.
Murals, stencils, graffiti or paste-ups mark the face of entire urban districts and have long since entered the cultural mainstream. As opposed to ubiquitous advertisement, they have the power to provide public space with a sense of individuality, identity and sometimes even controversy. But Urban Art even goes beyond that, as it invites us to experience the city not only as a site for architecture, but, above all, as a social space.