Rabat – The fifth Jidar Street Art Festival will be back in Rabat April 22-28. Organized by the Artistic and Cultural Education-L’Boulvart (EAC-L’Boulvart) Association, the festival will bring 12 local and international artists to Rabat, who will use building facades throughout the city as open-air canvases for large-scale murals.
The festival will also include opportunities to meet the artists, a number of masterclasses for students of the National School of Architecture (ENA), and a half-day art workshop open to the broader public.
The theme of this year’s festival is “childhood,” celebrating spontaneous creativity and imagination through abstract ideas, colors, and forms.
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The festival seeks to bring artists, the general public, cultural bodies, and local structures together to “rethink the world, and re-think the city, as well as relationships with public spaces” states EAC-L’Boulvart in its press release on the festival.
The festival will host artists from Morocco, such as Machima, a digital artist based in Casablanca, as well as international artists like Phlegm, a world-renowned British cartoonist and illustrator, and Caratoes, a Belgian-born contemporary artist who currently lives in Hong Kong.
The building facades chosen for this year’s festival are spread throughout Rabat and include facades of the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.
The museum has made available six facades of its building for street-art. Each year during the festival, artists will paint two facades of the museum on a rotating basis, bringing urban and contemporary art together.
The festival also includes a collective street-art project, where students from different art schools across Morocco will have the opportunity to work together on one large mural, under the guidance of Canadian artist Danae.
Morocco has a growing street-art culture, and a number of companies now offer street-art tours in major Moroccan cities.
