We are getting closer and closer to Nuart Aberdeen's kickoff on April 18th. Some of the programming is trickling out, and we are excited that MZM Projects will premiere their Nuart documentary, "Imaginary City," at Nuart Aberdeen at the Belmont Filmhouse at 2.15pm on Friday, April 19th. The street art festival is known for its in-depth programming, and along with mulitiple street art activations, there are lectures and film screenings around the art being made in the streets of Aberdeen, Scotland.
One of the fillmakers, Kristina Borhes of MZM Projects, will be at the screening for a Q&A session as well. More on the film:
As a festival Nuart works with artists who are producing topical and engaging work and we’ve been lucky to have MZM on hand to capture some of the ‘moments’ in between during our productions and we’re delighted to be showing their first full length film ‘Imaginary City’ at Nuart Plus this April. Years in the making, the film features interviews and stunning artworks from Ernest Zacharevic, Martin Whatson, Know Hope, Robert Montgomery, Fintan Magee, Ememem and Helen Bur to name a few, and gives a great insight into the world of Nuart and contemporary street art.
For the last few years the duo have been on hand during both Nuart Aberdeen and Nuart Festival, becoming vital members of the festival production team but also documenting many of the incredible Nuart artist’s. ‘Imaginary City’ is a poetic visual essay which traverses the history of Nuart Festival as a way to explore the magical ability of street art to change our ways of seeing the city, and the stories that we tell ourselves.
But to gain a proper insight into a festival like Nuart you need to spend a few days in the field where you might be helping paste up a billboard one minute, 60ft up in a cherry picker the next or wandering around the cities back alleys in search of the perfect spot for a little intervention. The vision of the festival acts as prisim through which the artists work is refracted out into the city creating moments on the streets which can often challenge the viewer whether its sinking oil tankers by M – City or patched up walls filled with Lego bricks via Jan Vormann.
Indeed the breadth of artists working across the different realms at Nuart Festival proved a great subject matter for MZM whos film’s delve a little deeper than the usual street art festival promos and hope to answer some of the who, what and why surrounding the sometimes large but often small interventions that occur every September. With many shared values, MZM Projects acts as a vehicle for research and in the ever expanding field of street art, they distil answers direct from the artists and of course festival organiser Martyn Reed. As a result the ‘Inspiring City’ is unique to its subject location in Stavanger but also looks at the universal nature of artists placing work in the public realm, a story that is played out across the globe from war zones to council estates and of course in our town centres.
