Street art in Ljubljana

by Eva Gale

You can call it vandalism or you can call it art, one thing is for certain: Ljubljana is rich with creative street art and colourful graffiti. Some are just regular funny writings on the wall and some are true art pieces that should probably hang in someone’s living room. Take a walk around town and see them for yourself.

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Take a look around

I’ve been living in Ljubljana for my entire life and being a local sometimes means that you either miss or pay absolutely no attention to certain buildings, certain streets or sights. That’s why I love playing a tourist in my own city. It gives me a chance to slow down, look up, look down, or take a different path to my destination. And I love finding all these cool stuff along the way. They have been there all along, I just never noticed. Like this space invader, watching your every move. Or this huge sticker of a panda driving a car. Do wave him back.

Graffiti are (il)legal

It needs to be said though, graffiti are officially illegal, but there are some spots where they are perfectly acceptable. Take Metelkova mesto for instance, the whole place is one big art show. Sculptures, graffiti, so many stickers, you can’t even count them. Everywhere you look there’s something creative and arty. There’s a basketball court at Metelkova where spraying graffiti is totally okay. I wonder if anyone comes to play basketball here, it seems the only sport that’s popular on this court is spray painting. And I find it funny how often these graffiti get repainted. The ones you see in this blog post, may not be there anymore when you decide to visit Metelkova.

Somewhat similar to Metelkova is Rog and everytime I go pass it, there’s something new on its outer walls. Like this Roman guy who is there to protect Rog from demolition. As you can see, someone didn’t like this thought and sprayed a long black line across it. I guess it’s tough being a graffiti artist.

One graffiti please

I find it interesting how graffiti are often associated with an “underground” subculture that rebels against authority and capitalism and yet there’s possible to find graffiti that are made to order. Like this one below, which was commissioned by a telecommunications company as a part of their anti-hate speech campaign. It contains slogans such as “Speak love” and “The power of words”. It also features this cool hand sign, which signals the letters L and J, meaning Ljubljana. How radical is this? The piece is indeed fascinating, though the obvious pink line and black spiral suggests that someone from the graffiti world wasn’t so pleased.