UPFEST 2024 - Spray, Pray, Worship: A Weekend at Europe’s Biggest Street Art Festival

UPFEST is the largest gathering of street artists in Europe (even though we’re not in Europe anymore, and could just as easily have ‘Scrawliest Part of That Island You Remember From Paul Mescal’s Instagram’ emblazoned on the website). Bristol is where it all began for the UK scene. And UPFEST has been running for 16 years. I have arrived to see why.

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“I built a skatepark with my bare hands,” says the fella across from me at the pub. I am half convinced. His white-boy dreads wag with derision, but his palms are clean, smooth, calloused only from handlebars. “We built it all,” he assures me, “and a cafe down the road stole our name… They legit started using it these last few weeks. So, y’know what I’m doing? I said, ‘I’ll put your windows in every night till you change it back.’ We’ve smashed ‘em right in.”

He couldn’t be happier or angrier about it. As is typical with the people of Bristol, his voice makes the heavier parts of his grievances rise, float, stretch themselves into kinder shapes, so they aren’t bombarding you as much as monologuing in a way that makes everything sound like it’s coming from the heart. Bristolians are often very chill. It’s obvious they care a whole lot about art and music and bikes and animals and the best revenge strategy against a thieving bistro. “That sucks for you,” I say, numb from gin. The fella looks at me. “Never take our work for yours,” he says, peering into the dark beyond our bar. “That is the most disrespectful, awful thing to do, when you weren’t part of it.”

He is Bristol in miniature: a place known for resisting forces that have kept other cities on a leash. 800 years ago, it was the second wealthiest community in England, buoyed by its intimacy with London and heaving trading ports. Trade continued to define its fortunes in the following centuries before Liverpool and the cotton trade moved in. Its prosperous, relatively educated citizens found a knack for protests. In October 1831, judge Charles Wetherell ignored 17,000 signatures from Bristolians supporting the Reform Bill, which expanded voting rights to the middle classes. A mob awaited his return. Wetherell fled into his manor and across the roof. Three days later, the city was in tatters, stores looted, several prisons burned to the ground. A further petition in January saved 27 of the 31 people convicted to hang for the violence. No-one dared ignore that slip of paper.

And whether you look at more recent events, such as the toppling of a slaver’s statue into Bristol Harbor during Black Lives Matter, or Alfred the gorilla throwing dung at German bombers over his zoo in World War II, Bristol rarely wants to get into bed with the status quo. It prefers tossing and turning, enjoying its own space. Which is perhaps why it’s very good at street art — and keeping the contemporary menace of commodification at bay.

So, what’s so special about this breezy slice of the Southwest?

Slipping off the M32, around the Bear Pit green, with the mercurial net of the Cabot Circus shopping mall creeping up on my left, I don’t know what to expect. I’ve always known Bristol as a place for talented weirdos, like Brighton but less piratecore. A visit here in 2016 was disastrous. I ended up sleeping in Temple Meads station in a coat with a busted zip. Security guards clapped to wake me. Somehow, I’d missed many of the murals here, but that’s already changing. I pass Connor Harrington’s duelists on Broad Street, a pair of men dripping to infinity on a chess board. Ahead, on the long climb to Cliffton, is a figure in white, their face masked with a lilac bouquet.

UPFEST let 100 artists loose across Bristol with their own walls, pegged and funded after four months’ deliberation.

UPFEST let 100 artists loose across Bristol with their own walls, pegged and funded after four months’ deliberation. “It’s mostly crowdfunding, some sponsorship,” says Steve Hayles, the festival’s founder, a former-insurance-broker-now-curator of UPFEST Gallery. “We managed to get Arts Council funding this year, but that doesn’t necessarily happen. And since we’re in the street art world, we’re quite moralistic, which means being careful with who we involve. Like we don’t want to promote vaping, or certain things, and stupidly [those companies] are the ones with the money.”

Bristol Council stays out of it. Hayles, whose father was an architect, says he lives by three rules of law for where to paint upon: It’s not a listed building, there’s no conservation ground to touch, and they have the owner’s permission. “The financial benefits to the city are obvious. By the time we were approached by planning people, around five years in, we’d already painted loads of walls.”

So, what does street art bring to a community? “Conversation,” he says. “A lot of people don’t go into galleries or museums. There’s a distance, whereas when you’re putting something in the public realm, everyone has to engage with it.”

It doesn’t take long to find someone who treasures civic provocation. I take the 45-minute walk south from my Cliffton hotel to UPFEST’s welcome party in the south of the city. Free booze sits in buckets while volunteers and other journalists drift around a bar. I take my complimentary Up-brand beer and pocket another for contemplation later. One broadcaster keeps rubbing a can against his cheek. The woman next to me, suddenly, is interesting. “Cycling past the Create Centre,” she says, “is so great. There are murals there you won’t find unless you stumble on them.” She sips her wine, shuts her eyes briefly. “You can smell the fresh paint. It’s so hard to reach.”

So, what does street art bring to a community? “Conversation,” he says. “A lot of people don’t go into galleries or museums. There’s a distance, whereas when you’re putting something in the public realm, everyone has to engage with it.”

She tells me about her days with the council — how a turning point in Bristol’s relationship with street art arrived in 2006, when Banksy stenciled Well Hung Lover on a sexual health clinic opposite the town hall. The piece depicts a man dangling on a window ledge while his lover’s husband scans the sky. It’s nude, crude, not quite quintessential work from the city’s native son. “Half of us loved it,” the lady says, “and it was right across the road, you couldn’t miss it. So, we held a poll. That was the first time any street art was legally condoned in this country.”

Banksy was an acolyte of Bristol’s first wave of graffiti legends, including 3D and Inkie, influenced by early hip hop from New York City. Crews and underground parties — many of them in a disused Volkswagen center — began to coalesce under the crust of mass unemployment. Inkie met the young Banksy while spraying a skate store and took him under his colorful wing. In 1998, the pair collaborated on Walls On Fire, an open-air exhibition that was in some ways the UPFEST prototype.

Yet the event we have now is a spiraling tribute to the future of the artform, not only its glorified mainstream progenitors. Around 60 volunteers act as a sounding board for the festival to shape relevant themes and programming. “Some of them,” Steve says, “have been with us for 15 years. They even take a week’s holiday to visit. If someone comes up with a new concept or format, we see what they think about it.” Unlike a lot of other mural festivals, artists don’t have to submit their vision in advance. “For a few key walls, we ask for that. But for 90% of the artists that come to us in the first week, I haven’t a clue what they’re going to paint.” Steve and his team have only had to remove two pieces in a decade and a half: a large-breasted lady by a school, and a bird on a shutter, which happened to face the home of a man with severe ornithophobia.

You can also see how techniques have changed in that time. “In 2008 we had, like, 50 artists, and most of them were using stencils. Now we have over 240 and probably 5% of those are stencil practitioners. All these contemporary artists recognize that painting on the street has an impact. Stencils, remember, are much quicker [to apply], and started very much illegally because you could get away with them. People like Snik are taking the form to a professional level, but there are plenty of platforms to spend, say, a week on a 50-foot building. Why not make it beautiful?”

One of UPFEST’s headliners, Mister Samo, enjoys the patience with which he can find a space and give it a slogan worth the stature. “A lot of what I do,” says the Portsmouth-based artist, “is about trans inclusion. In my hometown, there isn’t a wall I paint that isn’t destroyed . . .  That’s kind of wild, right?” He painted at WorldPride in NYC’s East Village, a project that blew up his canvas and reputation four years ago, before linking up with the festival, who loved his message. “The more you [demolish my work], the bigger I’ll go,” Samo assures me, “and the more it’s needed. Who destroys a wall that says you are loved? I’m thinking, You need the love more than anyone.”

On the second day, I follow the map Mister Samo has designed and wander amiably towards The Tobacco Factory, UPFEST HQ, where I spot a bearded man beneath a scaffold. He is Artez, a Belgradian muralist known for naturalistic cheek and tenderness. There isn’t much on the backside of the building; just an upside-down eyeball and shaded white drapes. “I’m starting slow in order to finish fast,” he says in a voice like a Boss sound system. “I’ve been creating an archive of interesting photos and concepts for the last six or seven years. I can never create an idea on the spot. It’s about the right thing for a certain location.”

We look at the brick wall. “What’s right for this place?” I ask.

“Here I decided to paint part of my ongoing series, Simple Acrobatics. The idea is to paint people in very weird positions, because with street art, we’re always making one pixel in a bigger picture. I’m also thinking about using the human figure as an element of composition, but not the central element. With public art — and especially murals — proposals with human figures are easier to get approval, which is a bit annoying. I don’t want that to grab all the attention.”

His soft eyes flit to the scaffold again. “Looks like someone is gonna dangle on aerial silk,” I say, and he says yeah, it’ll be a woman in a challenging position: A thought that follows me around the corner.

Opposite The Dame bar on Dean Lane, three women are getting to work as pop punk chugs from a speaker. A 10-foot cartoon ginger girl brandishes a spray can. On the left side of a wall that’s becoming increasingly black, three letters shine out: RBF. They stand for Resting Bitch Face, an all-female collective who mostly met in the city. Lupa, a loud lass with freckles, poses for me. “Who are you writing for, then?” she demands, and I hand her a copy of UP Mag #6. “Yes, Martha Cooper!” She touches the pages of our feature on Britain’s breakthrough street art photographer.

Another RBF-er bends to look too. “I’m kinda keen to get your take on Bristol,” I say, “being, y’know, the middle of the galaxy for work like yours in the UK.” But she almost spits on the grass. “Nah,” she says. “The council doesn’t do much for us. They don’t provide safe spaces to paint at all.”

Where does?

“Well like, it’s so different in Australia. I was painting over there recently. The town’s mayor came over to say ‘Hi’ and ‘We love what you’re doing’ and all that. The actual mayor. Can you believe it? You’d never get that here.”

It’s great and all that local government welcomes UPFEST and the footfall it attracts, yet a fair number of projects still happen in the shadows, above train tracks, under bridges and the cover of night.

The more I walk and spitball, the less benevolently Bristol’s authorities seem to art that springs from the weeds. It’s great and all that local government welcomes UPFEST and the footfall it attracts, yet a fair number of projects still happen in the shadows, above train tracks, under bridges and the cover of night. Grassroots groups have somewhat of a fight on their hands to spark discussion about the spaces we see every day, and what they signify, on their own.

An afternoon workshop drives the point home like a bobby-pinned note. It’s at the Hen & Chicken, a pub with the aesthetics of a crafts room. Upstairs, AdBlock Bristol is forming 16 or so people into a circle. “Here’s a slip of paper,” says one of the organizers, passing one to each of us. “It has a characteristic on it. We want you to step into the middle of the circle and act out what you’ve read.”

One girl is hunger, and rubs her belly. A middle-aged man to her left is meaning. “Yeah, alright, I don’t know what I’m doing!” he says, approximating a little jog on the spot with open arms. I get self-regard and assume it’s a dig from the festival organizers. “Whatever my thing is, you can’t be part of it,” I venture, stepping in and checking my hair on my phone.

After this, we are seated before a projection of digital billboards, bus ads and mildly sexual McDonald’s screens bearing half the golden M and white milkshake perspiring down a dewed cup. AdBlock is a volunteer-run organization dedicated to denying or removing corporate displays in the city. Doing this requires poring over planning applications and speaking to residents and councilors about the major advertisements encroaching on Bristol. To date, they’ve blocked 40 billboards.

More facts: A bus stop screen, we are told, consumes as much power as four households a year. Maccies, meanwhile, spends £78 million on roadside ads alone in the UK. Occasionally, there’s a self-own — one of the speakers notes that a display for the McCrispy burger in Cornwall was taken down because it was on the way to a crematorium.

“What’s an intrinsic value?” he asks. “The actual qualities of a thing. That burger has a bun, for instance. It solves hunger and pain quickly. You might value that. Yet advertisers also plie us with extrinsic values supported by repetition. These might be a longing for social status, wealth, power, sex or love, often at the cost of the environment.” Extrinsic associations are multiplied indefinitely across urban areas where we expect to see corporate images. It’s one of the ways in which marketing worms through you: This is the norm, so suck it up, there’s no other world.

AdBlock wants all of us to reject that normalcy. Instead, why can’t art fill city crevices? Why shouldn’t we be able to catch interesting visuals on a walk to a restaurant, a bike ride home, that are there for their own sake? Obviously, every artwork has values you can read into, but they’re not trying to sell you an Omega (unless they are and it’s ironic enough to be art again).

We take action. Split into four groups, we scatter crayons, pens, scissors and card to reclaim the streets. Stencils and stickers are regularly used to screw with monolithic advertisements. My lot spells three blocky words: “LISTEN TO THE” . . . with sparrows and blackbirds flying on a blue canvas. Listen to the birds, huh. It’s not Dylan Thomas, yet he didn’t have a timer over his head.

We’re led to an LED screen — some gut-crap-pro-bacteria-yogurt nonsense flickering away. Hands are raised. Tape is ripped. LISTEN TO THE BIRDS covers the screen’s top half, an eternal peace sign with leaves below. It’s so easy. You can feel the heat of the glass, the buzz of a message trying to tell us what to buy and who to be, through the card. Doused now, by strangers.

J. P. Potts is a copywriter and freelance arts journalist in London. He prefers stories and articles that kick you in the head and run away laughing. So far, you can find his published work in the pages—digital or imagined—of SMPLE, Deeds, Aesthetica, The Double Negative and The Skinny. He enjoys boxing and sensitive walks in yards with no sunlight.