Street art festival welcomes spring with colorful new murals in Elva Municipality
As May turned to June, the seventh Rural Urban Art (RUA) Festival took place. During the latest edition of the traveling street art festival, which aims to bring color to small towns across Estonia, ten artists came from far and wide to create a series of ambitious new works in off-the-beaten-track locations throughout Elva Municipality.
After breathing new life into the walls of Viljandi County in 2023, this year it was the turn of Elva Municipality in Tartu County to welcome top artists from around the world for the seventh Rural Urban Art Festival (RUA).
Over the course of a week, the artists, including Pablito Zago and Raphe (France), Ola Kalnins (Sweden), Baltic Murals (Lithuania), Mimmit Peinttaa (Finland), Greete Okas and Robin Nõgisto (Estonia), Viktoria Berezina (Ukraine), and Lily Brick (Spain), produced a series of new works in locations around the municipality.
Estonian street art crew Multistab also ran a workshop for local youngsters, decorating both sides of the fence outside a care home for the elderly in Rõngu.
The works created during the festival range considerably in style, with each artist adding their own creative flourishes. However, all were designed with the surrounding environment firmly in mind.
Ukrainian artist Viktoria Berezina transformed a Soviet-era bus stop by the side of the road in Valguta using a traditional Petrykivka painting style, while French artist Pablito Zago used characteristically vivid colors to brighten up the previously grey walls of the Puhja Youth Center.
Locals in Elva Municipality provided a warm welcome for all the visiting artists and provided them with a unique and unforgettable experience of Estonia. In the village of Annikoru, residents thanked artist Lily Brick for her mural, entitled "Welcome Spring," by performing a traditional folk dance.
"For me, spring is my favorite time but for the people of Estonia it is much more, after a hard winter, low temperatures and months of few hours of sunshine, spring brings color," Lily Brick wrote on social media.
"Flowers explode with beauty and nature is full of life in Estonia. Then people gather to celebrate and welcome the good weather by dancing, happiness, and singing. This touched me very closely, and I think it is a good example to follow, the south and the north of the country embracing, united, coming from different parts of the country without differences, for a simple and positive reason, the wake up of the nature."
"A small detail is that they popularly say that if the first butterfly you see is colorful you will have a pleasant spring full of flowers, that's why my choice was to paint Monarch butterflies. I feel lucky to have experienced your beautiful spring," she said.
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More information about the Rural Urban Art Festival, including photos of the murals created thsi year in Elva Municipality, is available here.
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Editor: Michael Cole
