San Hejmo Festival 2023, Urban Art District
San Hejmo Festival with huge open air gallery for street art
On 18 and 19 August, Airport Weeze will be transformed for the second time into a unique hotspot for live music, urban art, creativity and street food.
The San Hejmo Festival brings the stars of hip hop, pop and electro to the Lower Rhine: Apache 207, Die Fantastischen Vier, Marteria, Provinz, Sportfreunde Stiller, Tokio Hotel, Alle Farben, Esther Graf, Wanda, Lari Luke and many more.
National and international street art artists give the San Hejmo Festival its unique look. The huge open-air gallery exudes the artistic flair of trendy districts in European metropolises.
In addition to the musical highlights on four stages, the lovingly designed festival grounds will once again be the heart of San Hejmo. Around one hundred works of art can be discovered throughout the grounds. House-high murals, graffiti walls dozens of metres long, installations and exhibition towers form the huge San Hejmo Open Air Gallery. Around thirty artists contribute their works in different areas.
The Urban Art District impresses with four murals (murals) of thirty square metres each by this year’s headliners:
German-Pakistani graffiti artist Jasmin Siddiqui alias Hera returns to San Hejmo! In her large-scale murals, she combines touching motifs – often of girls and women – with distinctive typography and forceful messages. Her artworks can be seen all over the world, adorning facades from Sao Paulo to Moscow, from Miami to Kathmandu, from Paris to Melbourne.
instagram.com/hera_herakut/
The Portuguese artist Jaqueline de Montaigne will be in San Hejmo for the first time. The works of the self-taught artist and medical ethicist have recently been shown at festivals in Peru, Brazil, England, Italy and Portugal, among others. Her motifs combine fauna, flora and people and tell stories of cultural heritage, legends and symbols. Gilding lends her paintings a special glamour.
instagram.com/jdemontaigne
manda Arrou-tea aka Mandi Oh comes from the Spanish Basque Country. She studied fine arts in Spain, France and Mexico, having already lived out her passion for mermaids in oil as a young girl. The partly hyper-realistic works of the Berlin resident – often women in or under water – already adorn facades and canvases all over Europe.
instagram.com/mandioh
Sasha Korban comes from the Donetsk region in Ukraine. He worked as a miner from 2006 to 2011. He started with street art in 2002, but his career as an urban artist only began in 2009 and changed his whole life. His artworks depict figures and portraits in different techniques and styles such as realism, pop art and expressive conceptualism. He lives and works in Kiev.
https://www.instagram.com/sasha.korban
Creative installations and DIY offerings will once again find their place in the middle of the festival grounds in Stadtwald von San Hejmo. Already at the premiere, the tables, chairs, lamps and crocheted objects by Dorfmasche from Neukirchen-Vluyn were very popular. The group is emblematic of the diversity and openness of the urban art scene. For 10 years, women and men between 55 and 95 years of age have been combining their passion for knitting and crochet with communal fun and joie de vivre. This year they are supported by the Blauschäferei from Dormagen, whose peacefully grazing flock of blue sheep stands as a symbol for human togetherness, appeals to social responsibility and promotes a tolerant mindset. Spiritual attitude promotes.
The San Hejmo Open Air Gallery is complemented by numerous eight-metre-high exhibition towers spread across the entire site. Here, ADULTREMIX (Germany), hydrane (France), Fillin Guas (Greece), Mr. Oreo (Germany) and SWALT (Switzerland), among others, present their works of art on canvases or tarpaulins and turn the entire festival site into a creative journey of discovery.
Paris, San Francisco, Lisbon – Weeze: BORDALO II artwork for the Lower Rhine region
The huge upcycled sculpture made of plastic waste by Portuguese artist Bordalo II was one of the highlights of the San Hejmo premiere last year. The artwork depicts a wild boar’s head in reference to the regional wildlife.
Bordalo II is known for creating stunning animal sculptures from street waste – with a strong message to warn people about pollution and endangered (animal) species.
As of now, the unique work is open to the public free of charge. As a sign of solidarity with the region and as a thank you for the support, the organisers of San Hejmo have organised an exhibition at the Wildpark Weeze, which was opened today (Wednesday, 5 July) by Mayor Georg Koenen and co-organiser Bernd Dicks. For the next three months, everyone in the region will now have the opportunity to experience the internationally celebrated street art on the Lower Rhine.