Graffiti or art and the Bergen Kommune juncton box challenge!

Quite often, walking around Bergen, you see graffiti  The tags and cyphers showing that one particular person 'woz 'ere', are rarely nice or even artistic. The only positive maybe is that it does tend to crop up on the sides of really ugly buildings, site hoardings or derilict looking industrial areas!  Makes you think really 'what do I hate most, the architecture or the graffiti'!

I have yet to see graffiti on one of the lovely white painted 'fisherman's houses' in Sandviken - but it is obviously open house on the 60's apartment blocks and run down industrial units that stick out like sore thumbs!

Occasionally though you do come across graffiti masquerading as art.  Any comments welcome!

Soldier running out onto a hopscotch chalked on the ground - obviously we haven't had any rain recently otherwise he wold be jumping onto plain black asphalt. He doesn't have a gun though and no face either - wierd.



Rodin's thinker?

Just why these ducks are painted on the side of an old factory building I have no idea - maybe they made duvets here at one time?  Now it is a boarding house for those coming to Bergen with very little money.  Sometmes you can see in the windows and see small rooms containing bunk beds and little else.

I just love this one!

Are you a closet artist (direct translation of 'skapkunstner'), which would work if the english translation for elskap was electric closet!! One of those few occasions when a lack of varied vocabulary actually means the Norwegians can make a play on words that does not translate!!

Well Bergen Kommune is obviously very aware of the fact that there are several talented or artistically challenged (depends on your point of view) people hiding away locally!  So, they have asked for artists to come up with good designs to decorate one of the more ugly pices of street furniture that appears all over the Bergen town landscape - the junction box. 

A junction box is a cross between a fuse box and a transformer and they crop up in the most absurd places - usually on street corners.  Being grey, you tend not to notice them, but they are not particularly pretty. No Scandinavian designer or architect has taken on that challenge, yet!  

So, in the interests of brightening Bergen's streets the word is out that (as long as your design is approved by the city concil) you can be commissioned to transform one of these ugly protuberances into street art.  There are 31 scattered around Bergen, so it will be interesting to see the variety of designs that appear - I sincerely hope people rise to the challenge! Anything has got to be nicer than this!

  

Actually, it has been done before - in Sweden (see photo below). That's quite sweet really - if rather bland. I wonder what Bergensers will come up with?



If anyone wants to put in a design proposal go to www.bergen.kommune.no/elskap . All details are there - including complete measurements for the boxes!  Oh by the way, you have to understand Norwegian, and preferably have an address here, but guess something could be arranged for a small fee .... !!