CityLeaks

Info

CityLeaks
Cologne Urban Art Festival
www.cityleaks-festival.de

Geschichte

In September 2019 CityLeaks Urban Art Festival will take place for the fifth time under the title „re:public“. Intensifying dual research that enables art and academia to inquire and intervene artistically, represents a long-standing perspective for the festival’s development. The festival thus aims at integrating art, culture and knowledge within its diverse programme. CityLeaks Academy, a study on “urban commons” as well as a regional urban art archive are meant to demonstrate this integration process in particular.

CityLeaks Urban Art Festival seeks to critically confront and intervene in public space. Inspired by the philosophy of breaking silence, the festival attempts to demonstrate that art will not endure censorship, but can respond loudly and critically to its environment.
CityLeaks hereby evokes notions of anonymity, community and truth that the WikiLeaks project celebrates as its core values. Therefore, also the city itself is understood as a platform for citizens to express themselves and leak potentially subversive messages.

The festival conceives of artistic interventions into public space as acts of reclaiming the same. Thus, it aims at a creative appropriation of public space, at recontextualizing its architecture and social fabric as well as at creating new spaces for communal convention and discourse.