Femicomix – No means no mural @ Metelkova, Ljubljana 2021 / 14. – 19.6. / Autor: Ivana Armanini / Komikaze – Org & guider of the GESAMTKUNSTWERK TOUR on the STREET ART FESTIVAL LJUBLJANA: Nataša Serec / Kud Mreža.
Photo by: Laszlo Juhasz 
Photo by: Laszlo Juhasz 
PROGRAM: Gesamtkunstwerk Metelkova / NATAŠA SEREC + KOMIKAZE @ STREET ART FESTIVAL LJUBLJANA 2021
Ljubljana Street Art Festival 2021
https://2021.streetartfestival.si/en/
Ljubljana Street Art Festival is the first international contemporary street art festival in Slovenia. Born from a passion for street art, graffiti, urban art, and interventions in public spaces, Ljubljana Street Art Festival brings together international and local artists and scholars.
The Festival invites visitors to read the streets, participate in activities as well as it showcases young, emerging generations of street artists to ensure a bright future for one of the most important art movements of the 21st century. #LJSAF, turning the city into a canvas – the third year in a row!
Ljubljana awakens in colors again. The third edition of the Ljubljana Street Art Festival (LJSAF) returns to the streets, galleries, Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture and other hidden and less hidden corners of the city. This year’s festival program includes both local as well as international artists and speakers. The week-long festivity remains faithful to its mission: to read the streets and familiarize all generations with the visual and theoretical aspects of this urban phenomenon. LJSAF includes a series of colorful events such as guided tours, workshops, concerts, a conference and the reopening of the largest gallery in the city – Ljubljana’s streets.
since 2004, kud mreža has been running a programme called urban art projects, also called gesamtkunstwerk metelkova mesto. the project is devoted to renovations and artistic augmentations of public spaces in and around metelkova. the programme is responsible for more than hundred projects, from smaller interventions with semi-permanent installations to bigger ones, such as park sculptures. beside alkatraz gallery, kud mreža also runs the somewhat unique night window display gallery pešak which exhibits special light-based artworks behind the glass windows of one of metelkova’s buildings, and can be seen consequently only by a telescope placed on a tower nearby.
visual appearance of metelkova mesto has been developing according to the “work-in-progress” principle. the intentionally-never-completed image of acc metelkova mesto offers to its residents as well as to the growing number of visitors something ljubljana has not witnessed before: public art does not come into being commissioned by market-oriented or urban planners but arises from creative initiative of local artists and craftsmen and also international art residents.
the “metelkova style” is characterized by fine art recycling aware if the fact that artistic intervention into space can not be limited to the beaux arts filed to consider wider social context. exterior of the buildings is therefore being converted into a particular location and public art, which partly preserves acc metelkova mesto from destructive forces of profit and appeases the gentrification processes. for the last 13 years, the urban fine arts projects have been propping up artistic transformation of the metelkova agora; partly with a view to reminding the audience with 107 well-preserved artworks of the fragility and continuous transformations that the collectivity of such magnitude is experiencing.