I have written already about my hobbi which is not connected with Maps and travels and have promised to share my recent hobby, which is directly connected with my local guides activity.
This hobby is a hunting, murals hunting.
You ask, why hunting? But what other word can I use? You really can notice all main rules of hunting in my activity. First, I need to determine the estimated habitat of the object (and fix it’s location in the list). Not always I have a proper address, sometimes it’s only the name of the street or the district. But even when you have already the exact address, you need to hunt down that beast. Even huge murals can be hidden in the most unexpected places. You can know the right exact address, walk around again and again, finding secondary small wildfowls, such as photoes of the shops and sights along your road, and you still won’t see your coveted prey. It’s a real joy to find and catch it at last!
Almost all murals in Minsk were created as part of the Urban Myths art project and the Vulica Brasil festival, in which Brazilian and Belarusian artists turn the streets of Minsk into “galleries” with murals, sculptures, graffiti and other forms of street art. The main theme of Vulica Brasil 2019 was ecology.
But new large-scale works began to appear, which are ordered by state or private companies. All these graffiti have a legal status and appear with the permission of the city authorities. Let some call it easel art, but thanks to new unusual drawings, the capital of Belarus is becoming more beautiful and livelier.
The first place you should visit if you want to start exploring Minsk murals is Oktyabrskaya (Kastrychnitskaya) Street. It’s the center of Vulica Brasil festival and you can easily find a lot of great works here (but don’t even expect to find all of them from the first time, I think I didn’t find all myself).
Creation (Legends of Belarus) with the Gusli Player (Guslyar), painted by the Belarusian artist Eugene Matyuto (Cowek), has actually become a symbol of the whole mural movement of Minsk. “Everything is based on folklore: I have a sage who sits in a certain sphere, like a chaga mushroom growing on trees. The sage plays the harp (gusli). He creates music that materializes in some objects, they envelop him”, - the author told about his work. This year, during the Vulica Brasil festival, the artist completed the work. According to him, it is very difficult to continue your drawing in a year, since the worldview and style have changed over this time. But, despite this, he defeated the Guslyar and the Bird of Happiness, adding new legends.
On the next photo you can see two different murals.
One of them is the work of the Brazilian artist Rogerio Fernandez, who painted Frida Calo and Vincent Van Gogh soaring in the air and hugging black and white giraffes, inside of which people kiss (Love of Frida Kahlo and Vincent Van Gogh). “A passerby must turn on his imagination and understand what is painted here. I don’t want to chew and present everything on a silver platter, then people will not fantasize. Children in games develop their imagination, and when they grow up, they stop thinking. Adults also need to think, ”the Brazilian mysteriously told about his work.
And the second is the Harmony mural of Belarussian artist Alexei Antony from Magilev. His idea is a certain image that exists in each of us, reflecting harmony, the interaction of individual elements in a complex system.
Graffiti from the Brazilian artist Ramona Martins. It’s a colorful kaleidoscope of animals which can be found in Belarus rarely. He draw it during two years.
Family values by Cowek (Eugene Matyuto) and Julia Stratovich, Belarus
A man and a woman are holding a house - a family hearth that takes knowledge and energy from the universe. And Julia from Moss Town Studio helped decorate the graffiti with moss.
A portrait of Karol Jan Chapsky, who at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was three times elected as the head of Minsk. Under his leadership, a lot was done in the city: a theater was completed, a konka (horse drawn city railway) was opened, and a power station was built. The work was done in an unusual stencil style: standing next to the wall, you can make out only white and black circles, and the pattern will appear only at a distance.
This place is my favourite, but I couldn’t find the information about it, it’s pity. National motives in combination
with modern emogy of the stairs can’t leave us indifferent.
The last magic country by Bazinato (Bazyl Stakhievich), Belarus
The artist turned to the topic of ecology and painted a forest inhabited by super creatures. Tree veins, ravenous planes, eyeless creatures - “nature, like man, arms during a disaster.”
A Brazilian artist of Japanese descent drawn the mechanical hands of a bizarre form. By his words it’s an opportunity to learn about Minsk dwellers and pass them something from himself: “Life is an exchange”.
“Technology is increasingly leaking into all areas of our lives, sometimes we don’t even notice it. On the one hand, such a symbiosis is convenient and practical, but on the other hand, important meanings may be lost in the flow of progress, ”says the young artist and illustrator Vadik Fin about his work Techno Wolf. “The idea of the work is to show how thin the line of technology penetration into all living things that surrounds us.”
More photos you can see by the link
I would like to mention @AniaKiser here, I know she is fan of street-arts.
It’s great that Belarus has so much to ofert, I’ve never been to Minsk, but I need to put it on my travel list.
