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.
CityLeaks immerses itself into the urban microcosm of Cologne’s booming quarter Ehrenfeld, explores strategies for (re)claiming public spaces and documents the origins, errors and potentials of the borough´s current changes. Rethinking the city and its streets as an assemblage, as a space whose functions, relations, meanings and apperances may be reinvented upon every new use and composition thus emerges as the festival’s leitmotiv. This publication retraces the discourse and outcomes of Cityleaks in 2019, their artistic and exploratory processes just as much as their manifold interactions with space and people.
Artists
ao. Andrey Ustinov, ZOER, Olivier Swiz, Mathieu Tremblin, belit såg, Orizzontale, Lukas Friedlich, Alex Schweder & Clemens Klein, craus | hahn, Marje Hirvonen