Re-Bomonti Street Art Performance & Exhibition from Flyermen Guerilla Solutions on Vimeo.
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As part of Bomonti Street Art Festival in Istanbul, which I was invited last week, I was also asked by the Bilgi Collegue if I could make a graffiti workshop with 29 children. The kids, between 8-9 years had previously never something do with graffiti. After a 1.5 hour “free” preparation phase and the first spraycan control / spray test, we decided due to the fact of the amount of the participants (29Kids), to spray the turkish alphabet (29 letters) on the wall. I freestyled the first letter combination on the wall and became the vision, whilst sketching to fill the abc with a rainbow gradient (+/- some greytones) from left to right. I did this because I liked the idea to bring more “nuances” into the piece and show them the variety of an colourscale. On the other hand i thought it going to be good to minimize the procedure before the kids became overwhelmed by the situation. One color for one letter – one Letter for one person. This keeps the chaos away within the group of 29 Kids and everyone could produce one single letter for themself with one color in 2 hours!
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Each participant had to prepare a letter completely for their own, (fill-in, Outlines, highlights and Shadows). My idea was to fix up everything at the end because i wanted to retain that “childish” fillins of the each letter. But due to heavy rain, the workshop sadly had to be stopped unfortunately during the outline phase and it was´nt really nice to see all that smiling faces looking downwards a bit. For sure they was happy and thanksfull for this great expierience – but an unfinished piece for me, is a unfinished piece for them, too.
Since there was not much more time (for the kids, as for me, too) and it was still raining heavily and also became darker – I did´nt reaaallllyyy know how to finish this wet wall before i leave.
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As it then, before my departure (next day at 5o´clock in the morning – “take notice”), it suddenly stopped to rain and the wall went dry within 1h. I went back to the spot and wanted to finish what we started – my aim was simply to give a finished piece to these nice individuals – i could´nt keep the faces in my mind and I really dont wanted to remember their sad faces. So i went back to the stockroom and tooked all the cans i need to finish this piece.
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Next day i´ve heard that all these kids was sayng my name like (RUSL´Abi (Abi means big Brother in turkish) finished our Wall- yeeaaahh etc.) Although of this young age and the heavy rain, I would like to send some HUGE kudos to these kids. They put all a tremendous power and high inquisitive of the day, which made me very surprised and proud. THANK YOU – It´s always worth!!
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Enclosed you can see some pics of that nice day HERE.
