Somos Todos Artistas. Um exercício de reflexão a respeito da autonomia criativa e das formas de classificação relacionadas à criação

This article is about the construction of identities of artists working in the streets taking as reference the movemnt "Life is a party". This movement occurs since 2002 and put all together artists from the music, visual arts, dramatic art, literature of "cordel", "Tambor de Crioula", poetry and "Bumba meu bi" with performances every thursday in the center of the brazilian city São Luís do Maranhão. This approach includes reflections about expressions showed in this event as "art of the streets" or "art in the streets", as a singular mode of solidarity among the artists and a way to build social relations. In the case analysed here, the production of art implies a identity of artist that deny the institutional and market relations of meaning.

Art in the Streets: Modern Art, Museum Practice and the Urban Environment in Contemporary Morocco

Every summer, cultural festivals take place all over Morocco, and streets in towns and cities become animated scenes for the articulation of Moroccan contemporary culture. So animated, heterogeneous and pluralistic has this festival scene become that the semiofficial newspaper for the Islamist PJD party has called these street festivals “vectors of decadence” and performing-artist union officials have declared that they feel threatened by the “foreign invasion” of internationally-based diaspora groups. Recently, in a critique of these attitudes, the magazine Telquel reported that they are “sick of the wet-rags of the festival season” that deny “millions of happy festival-goers the occasional…free oasis in the grand cultural desert of Morocco.” Describing the street as an oasis of culture vis-à-vis the desert landscape of Moroccan cultural institutions is not a new trope. In this paper I explore how Moroccan artists have engaged with the potential, promise and problems of art in the street when gallery spaces and museums fail to integrate modern art into a wider Moroccan cultural landscape.