More than 50 graffiti artists from all over Europe will be transforming the walls of the Freetown Festival into a gigantic art piece of colourful celebration. I spoke to the Meeting of Styles organizers.

Meeting of Styles is the world’s largest graffiti and street art festival with more than thirty events a year unfolding all over the world. Normally, the Copenhagen edition of Meeting of Styles takes place in July in the area around Axeltorv, from the entrance of Tivoli to the Pumpehuset venue. This year, the entire event is moved to Christiania in September, joining the freetown’s 50th birthday celebrations.

The Meeting of Styles team is curating the wall surrounding the event with a complete artistic birthday make-over – transforming 250 meters of wall stretching from Prinsessegade to Refshalevej.

“One of the first Meeting of Styles Copenhagen events was held at Christiania back in 2003, so revisiting this artistic epicenter will be amazing!” says Steffen Gray, who has been organizing Meeting of Styles Copenhagen since 2015 with Toke Kjer.”

Around 80 percent of the artists at Meeting of Styles Copenhagen travel to the festival from abroad. And pretty much all of them visit Christiania during their visit anyways – to enjoy the freetown vibe and the abundant creativity of the place”, Steffen says.

Usually the Meeting of Styles Copenhagen lineup has a lot of graffiti artists joining from South America and the United States. Due to travel restrictions, this year’s lineup is more European than usual, with lots of artists from Denmark, Finland, Belgium, France and Germany, quite a few from England and Sweden and some arriving from Holland, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland and Austria.

This year, for the first time ever, the artists will be provided with an inspirational mood board including stories and artistic outputs from the Christiania archives of the past 50 years which they can incorporate in their works if they feel like it. Directly or indirectly.

“There is so much more to Christiania than the narrative about Pusher Street and the police. Christiania is a vital center of vibrant creativity and abundant inspiration and such a great place to meet people. And the artists can incorporate images from those 50 years of colourful creativity if they feel like it. But they have full artistic freedom. They can paint whatever they like”, Steffen says.

Most of the artists will be checking in on Thursday the 23rd and will be painting until Saturday the 26th. A good time to visit Meeting of Styles will be every day from 14 o’clock until dinner time, where most of the artists will be active. Friday and Saturday will be the most interesting days visually, as many of the pieces will be close to completion. Revisiting the walls several times during the festival to watch the progress of the artworks is highly recommended.

Meeting of Styles Copenhagen takes place during the Freetown Festival, from Thursday September 23rd to Saturday September 25th. It is completely free and publicly accessible, transforming the walls from Prinsessegade to Refshalevej. 

– More on Meeting of Styles here: https://www.streetstudies.eu/meeting-of-styles
– The artists will be announced continuously at https://www.instagram.com/meetingofstyles_cph/
– More Freetown Festival info (and tickets): https://freetownfestival.dk

Meeting of Styles 2021 graphics: Furious Styles Crew