ESTAU | Estarreja Urban Art 2016

"The great schools of fine arts are the museums. I wanted one in every town and in every village for the people to rise in spiritual communion of the beauty.”, Egas Moniz (Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1949)

It was in this way that in July 2016, ESTAU | Estarreja Urban Art presented itself to the world. With this quote, engraved at the door of the house Egas Moniz lived in Estarreja, that captured our attention since the first visit (2014) and was assumed as a motto for this great adventure, in which we hoped to take art to the streets and transform Estarreja into an open air museum. But much more than a museum, which many times, immediately (and mistakenly) is perceived as a static entity, we wanted to present and generate the inverse: an enormous dynamism, of constant and renewed discovery, a form and matter to think and reflect on an immense territory and, without stigmas or prejudices, to 'create' culture.

ESTAU assumed itself immediately as festival that would put Urban Art in dialogue with the city, with people, with heritage, with nature and with the other arts, articulating all the actors, equipment and entities, material and immaterial which compose a territory as a whole, crossing all this with other scales, with other 'invited' realities.

In order to build this dialogue, we outlined the painting of murals and other smaller supports, the construction of installations, workshops, projection of movies, the realization of guided tours, music concerts, performance shows and more.

During the 1st EDITION of ESTAU, more than 30 activities (permanent and parallel programming) were carried out in different artistic areas, in different formats and levels of participation, fully open to the public, which aspired to respond to a heterogeneous public, both with regard to interests, ages or genre.

By the end of the 1st edition, it was with great enthusiasm and gratitude that we observed the well-known and specialized WideWalls platform (Switzerland), to choose the mural produced by the Australian Fintan Magee, as the 6th best work of 2016 worldwide.

It was also with great satisfaction that we watched the documentary of this edition of ESTAU, Alvanéu, directed by André C. Santos, be part of the Official Selection of the VII edition of the NY Portuguese Short Film Festival, organized by the Art Institute of New York.