Street Art City, Lurcy-Lévis, France
Luscious, phantasmagoric, street art extravaganza in France’s countryside.
Lurcy-Lévis is a smallish town in Auvergne, toward the top end of Allier, where the hills are gentle, cows graze, most every town offers a medieval church or local chateau, and pretty rivers are swimmable. Even so, foreign tourists are relatively few (so enjoy while you can). It’s a pleasant drive in the countryside even without a destination – we drove from Néris-les-Bains, just the other side of Montluçon, with stops at the lovely Hérisson (hedgehog) and at Couleuvre (grass snake) with its espaliered plane trees.
But we had a destination! A knock-your-socks-off surprise awaits in Lurcy-Lévis! A few turns, and you arrive at the gate to Street Art City. Nothing along the way prepares you for this over the top, right now, luscious extravaganza of some of the best street art the world. What? Here? How?!
An Abandoned Campus
The short story is that France Telecom moved out of a major training center campus, with its assorted buildings and lots of space. Weeds took over the grounds. The buildings deteriorated – broken windows, sagging doors, collapsed wall board and ceiling tiles, invading damp, and a 128-room residence hall in advanced disrepair. Then came visionaries who saw an exceptional venue for street art. Initial invites went to some of the world’s best-known street artists, and the City is open, with monumental paintings on building façades, a wildly illustrated shed where the City’s food truck chef serves up meals, and installations in, at my visit, about half of the 128 rooms in the old residence hall, now called Hotel128.
Stunning, freaky, outsider art but by invitation – wait! That sounds curated, mainstream, doesn’t it? No. Not really curated but invited and offered space. And street art – however you define it – has immediate impact. It’s cerebral, but I found it even more emotional. Minds wide open, come and experience an immersive art-crawl through a space where your lone presence becomes part of the artist’s conception.
Stunning street art is everywhere to be seen
A City with a Gate
“Are we expecting you?” asked the woman who opened the gate when my friend from Néris-les-Bains and I drove up. No. Maybe she asked because there was a crew coming to film the send-off of a painted recycling bin the city of Montluçon had commissioned from the artist Snake. We watched a crane hoist the wrapped bin onto a flatbed truck, to be delivered to Montluçon for the reveal. The load-up made the 7 PM local news. But that aside, it wasn’t busy at the City on a sunny weekday afternoon with luminous white buildups that threatened showers. We saw maybe six other people. And yes, it did pour just before we left. My first thought was of all those forever-broken windows.
Equipped with a map and “exhibition catalog,” we wandered around the campus to see the exterior paintings (and a couple of sculptures as well). The bunker is painted outside and in; inside, birds flitted around in the painted, echoey space. Other buildings have painted facades. A man told us to photograph one of them; subtleties could be seen only in a photo. In the old residence hall, Hotel128, about half of the rooms already had installations.
Jail bullding
Important to know – the building has been left broken. This is a street art venue, not a “sanitized” museum. And an allergy alert: there’s a lot of mold. Take tissues. But guided by the list of rooms and artists, I went into each room, alone as instructed. It’s important not to be distracted, and to be in each scene as an element of its concept. Open your mind, close the door, and be immersed. The rooms vary. Passé-Presént, Tetra Pack, La Chambre des Refusés, Pars Pro Toto and almost 50 others. I found some moving, some cute, a few serene, others troubling, puzzling, or unpleasant. One artist incorporated a leaking crack in the ceiling and the thick moss growing on a broken window frame. Men and women painters. And throughout, the mold. In some rooms, I lingered; a few were so disturbing that I left before becoming immersed.
Street Art City
While you’re visiting Street Art City, have lunch at the food truck. The chef did some great cooking in his truck-kitchen. It was harder for him to get a foreign connection on his credit card reader, so outsiders should have a cash backup handy. There’s also an exhibition space with temporary exhibits, and a gallery where these artists of the street sell more portable works that you can hang or install in a house. I found one piece I really wanted, an interior of a New York subway car. But it was way out of my budget. These artists can command high prices.
Street Art City’s art won’t be static. In the spirit of street art, new artists will eventually paint over these first paintings, so the experience won’t be the same each season. A curator told us that there’s a waiting list of 900 artists who want to participate.
Street Art City will be on-going, but always changing. Check out the website and be sure to watch the short video! The video is also on YouTube. And from YouTube, here’s a glimpse of Hotel128. Just to give you an idea. What a place!
Street Art City dining shed
Where is Street Art City?
If you draw a not-quite square, with Bourges, Nevers, Moulins, and Montluçon at the corners, then Lurcy-Lévis would be near, but not quite in, the center.
Trip date: 2018
