30th edition ARCA - Encuentro Internacional de Artes de Calle

This year, ARCA celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. Over the years, more than 400 professional street arts companies from all five continents have visited Aguilar. During this time, the symbiosis between the space, the public and the artists has been total. The festival has generated a demanding and loyal public, and the artists have celebrated this generosity with their work, their effort and their commitment. ARCA has shown us the “public space”, that shared space of collective property. Our squares and our streets have become a fabulous playing field where the artistic gesture has evolved in space and time. All of this is made up of people, whether they are residents or just passing through, with architecture and urban planning, with the climate and the landscape, where a fertile disorder has transfigured the familiar and its uses, where a square has become an ocean, a building has been transformed into a theatrical apparatus, a roundabout into a circus or a park into a large dance floor.

ARCA has reconverted these spaces into other uses: festive, poetic, playful, political spaces, shared spaces where one can breathe disorder, question, make circulations turn, joyfully shake up habits, in short, divert the routine of flow. Creating and intervening in public space has meant weaving relationships with all those who have passed through it, including those who were not familiar with places dedicated to art. It has allowed surprise, fracture, meeting and mutual recognition between artists and users of each space. Such meetings have unwittingly written a human history, that of the neighborhood, the town, the landscape. They have made shared stories a common memory for the participants. Hence the importance of the development of the festival with the presence of artists in everyday life, together they have invented other views and other uses of the living environment. It has also been about playing with the ephemeral and the event, deploying interventions in street art manifestations, under the sign of the festival that has brought together artists and the public without distinction of religion, ethnicity and social class. All of this has produced shared traces and stories that have nourished the city and the memory of its inhabitants. But ARCA's main asset has been its ability to generate support from the local population and from multiple actors: administrations, companies, merchants, social and educational structures, groups, and the different organisational teams responsible for making everything work. For this reason, it is time to thank all of them for their involvement and commitment to the festival. Now it is time to look forward because as the playwright Edward Bond said, "art comes from the future."