There’s a bit of a battle going on in Tallinn at the minute over the works commissioned by the city: several of the sub-districts have been commissioning works every summer for the last few years, usually on things like electrical cabinets, water facilities, bridges etc, and this year several of them were defaced very quickly in an explicit declaration of war (though I guess they would say the city declared war first by painting over their throw ups…)
Most of the discussion online about this has been on social media, and mostly in Estonian, but it’s now made it to the English language edition of the public broadcaster:
This is exactly why so many official programs misfire, because they have no understanding of the community.
Declaring an open war on graffiti and eventually erasing graffiti for their projects has never worked before. Look at NY.
Street Art is in many cases visual ‘prettier’ but graffiti is still very much entangled in the scene. Work with them or at least talk with them to see what works best.
I think that explains what I saw with Bring the Paint back in 2024. Firstly, it was organised by Leicester city Council with GraffHQ, the supplier of spray paint to everyone in the area, so they REALLY know the local scene. Big names were brought in from all over the world, and they all were given official sites to paint. But as well as that, there were lots and lots of security hoardings near these sites which local street writers were given to do their thing. That, and Leicester has so many legal sites as well as Hall of Fame locations, it is no wonder that everyone’s art was treated with respect, and BTP24 went down so well.
Next year is the 10th anniversary of BTP, and a little bird tells me they have the funding, so May next year should be incredible!
I think in Tallinn it’s a bit more complicated than even the ERR article sets out. The city has been working with the community for a while now, have set up a bunch of official walls that have worked well (as well as there being at least a dozen spots that aren’t official, but might as well be, where there have been multi-day jam sessions etc with no issue), have funded several festivals that brought in international artists, and generally been making a lot of the right moves.
These officially funded murals are slightly different, in that they’re commissioned through contests with public votes rather than the artist being free to paint whatever they like. But the city have clearly been led to believe that the rules would generally be respected on them, and for the most part they have: there’s been very little even basic tagging over most of them. But there are a handful of people/crews who have been trying to outdo each other with citywide coverage of relatively large, but still quick and simple bubble tags (the most prolific ones easily have hundreds, and have been getting their own press coverage recently, e.g. The mystery of Tallinn's 'CTAH' graffiti outbreak | News | ERR ), and one of those seems to have got upset that some of these murals went over their throwies. So they’ve struck back, and the city officials are mostly saying, hold on, we thought you weren’t supposed to just slap a big tag over a full artwork - which is a relatively nuanced response compared to just bemoaning all graffiti as vandalism.
It also hasn’t helped that some of these particular murals were done in collaboration with local youth groups as part of a peace project, so public support is overwhelmingly on the city’s side.
AFAIK the current plan is to repaint these back to how they were, but a key question is how long they’ll survive like that if/when they do.
I think the other possibly more interesting question is what the response would be if someone completely painted over one of the officially commissioned murals with a full-size, obviously higher quality piece…