In a world of eight billion voices, I believe statistics is the only unbiased force to be trusted. I venerate the proverbial ‘bell curve’ as if it were a near-divine concept, this idea that the normal distribution governs every area of our earthly lives. This view means that as the COVID-19 crisis mounted, I assumed most people would gather around the average, acting in a mixed bag manner that married resilience with paranoia. I also assumed there would be smaller amount of people deviating towards more decided responses — ‘bad’ responses like hoarding or racism, or ‘good’ responses like volunteering or organizing community-wide aid.
I utilize this framework for understanding reality because reality in its natural state often proves too chaotic for my mind to process. The COVID-19 crisis is the most profound, far-reaching phenomenon I’ve ever witnessed. Its impact has been explored ad nauseam across the web. As large swaths of the population find themselves stuck at home, countless entities are striving to stay relevant amidst brick-and-mortar shutdowns by translating their operations into an onslaught of new content, much of which has dissected and contemplated and poked fun at the coronavirus crisis, according to the mission of each voice behind the screen.
As an eternal outlier in terms of purely authentic expression, Nuart Festival has publicly grappled with their relationship to visibility amidst the pandemic. This year marks the 20th anniversary of Nuart Festival’s inception and Nuart Aberdeen‘s fourth edition. The mural festival in Aberdeen has been postponed indefinitely. According to a press release by the organization, Director Martyn Reed determined in October 2019 that this year’s iteration, originally scheduled for April, would center around the idea of Freedom. “At that time our rights to the city were already looking tenuous under an onslaught of private capital appropriating ‘public space,’” the press release explains.
To accommodate the famously unprecedented circumstances, Nuart’s team presented “The Lockdown Edition,” a modified effort “which rises from the ashes of what we had originally been working towards for months before the world had to take pause.” This innovation allows the festival’s original lineup, including Biancoshock (IT), ICY & SOT (IR), Jacoba Neipoort (DK), Jofre Oliveras (ES), Nuno Viegas (PT), Paul Harfleet (UK), Sandra Chevrier (CA) and Vladimir Abikh (RU), to “communicate with the city of Aberdeen and the world at large during these trying times, they adapted their concepts to suit a poster campaign.”
The ethos surrounding “The Lockdown Edition” is perhaps best encapsulated by the work of Jofre Oliveras. The artist’s contribution, titled ”PLEASE WAIT” is a simple poster featuring a universal loading signal, a wheel of cycling lines. Nuart’s website writes that this work “hopefully goes some way to explaining why we haven’t yet released these images – these works being produced on the streets between April 22–26th, old news in a culture that now streams content into our living rooms as it happens.”
There is a moral quandary at play with our digital response to this pandemic, this widespread belief that we are coming together by staying apart and that lifestreams are the solution for a society suffering from isolation. Prioritizing new content can trivialize the real suffering ravaging the world. A tragedy should not be a business opportunity, but people still need to make a living. Art should be the method by which we can observe societal phenomenons at a distance, a real-time mirror elucidating our shared values. This idealistic hope becomes bastardized by the many methods in which art is commodified for profit.
I admire Nuart for their commitment to evaluating their own role in this equation of conquest for digital attention in the face of a pandemic. Their website also explains that “As the scale of the humanitarian crisis was revealed, we felt uncomfortable competing for the public’s attention with the news cycle’s relentless reports of a serious lack of life saving PPE equipment and a mounting death toll. To be honest, we still don’t feel comfortable with it, and we shouldn’t let this shift, nor this industrial scale move to occupy our attention in virtual space go uninterrogated.”
Nuart’s press release follows this same thread: “We could write reams on how and why we need to remain vigilant in these trying times, how we need to maintain a radical scepticism about structures of authority, including within our own culture, and how we might continue in our attempts to provoke and inspire by placing art on the streets. There’s an opportunity here to show why street art culture, and underground cultures in general, are profoundly relevant to these times. Our Nuart family is working with a need to discover and present content that we are producing organically – to decide that there isn’t a central message, a corporate platitude, or ‘a way forward’ – to drop the idea of ‘timed posts’ and any thought of a centralized marketing plan or strategy to disseminate content. These are unchartered waters, and first and foremost we would like to stay kind to ourselves, gentle to others, and remain in synchronicity with the communities that surround us.”
However, they understand the greater picture and street art’s role at play within it. To this end, they believe that “Relocating existing structures and our practice to the digital realm hasn’t solved the problems that were being revealed in the rush to professionalise and rebrand “street art” as “neo-muralism” or “urban contemporary” – it’s merely revealed more of them… now is perhaps a good time to open up this discussion before the online space becomes too crowded with works fighting for whatever cultural capital is still available.”
Adding to the problem’s pressing nature is the fact that their latest efforts coincided with International Workers Day on May 1st. “Though most of us celebrated it from the comfort of our living rooms, we remained aware that it was a comfort won from struggles fought on the streets,” the website’s entry continued. “Struggles that many workers over the years have suffered and died for. Now rebranded as ‘key workers,’ they are once again being asked to risk all for little in return. The launch of Nuart Journal on the theme of ‘Freedom’ on this date had a particular resonance.”
Nuart Journal is, in my opinion, the most critical component to the team’s pandemic response. The Freedom issue is the fourth in its existence. Like “The Lockdown Edition” their website’s announcement for the journal’s latest edition explains that is also seeks to evade participation in the “tsunami of ‘creative content’” which they assert, acts “as nothing more than an ad break during a disaster movie.” For this endeavor, “Some of the finest academic minds, writers, artists, and vandals produced articles on Freedom, and for the mural component of the festival, a lineup of varied and equally fiery artists were working on visual pieces to align with the same concept.” The journal is available for free, digitally, in full, and features relevant topics such as “Graffiti and Street Art on Instagram.”
“The Lockdown Edition” and Issue 4 of Nuart Journal exemplifies the organization’s position at the far end of innovation. At a time like this, conflicted over the most ethical method by which to provide for their fans, Nuart seems to understand the unique role they play as an anchor within the global street art landscape. They serve to connect and highlight the most authentic talent available on our ailing planet. “The power of festivals is, of course, never really in the scale of the production or the skill of the artist, but in the assembly,” they explain on their website, “the IRL ‘campfire’ coming together of people in time and space to share and recollect stories of the day, both real and imagined. The often mundane enlarged and reflected by the fire on to the city’s empty walls.” This reflection somehow manages to encapsulate all datapoints available throughout the human experience in their own divine entropy, far more dazzling than what my mind might neatly arrange into a sterile bell curve.
