C215 Playlist
- Text by Amrita Riat
- Photography by Teresa Madeline
Two masters degrees, one in Renaissance History and the other in German Romanticism, couldn’t stop Christian from becoming a cultural rebel. His fate was sealed as a teenager tagging walls with love messages to girls he liked, and then later when he took on the illegal walls of Paris armed with a stencil, insane creativity and an astute sense of context.
Exhibiting at StolenSpace Gallery in London twenty five years after he first started, the French street artist gave HUCK a candid interview sketching out his regrets (“I wish I had a better job”), shading his body of work with meaning (“It’s something that gathers rather than divides”), and connecting the dots that drew the path to where he is now, including his street art inspirations – Swoon and Banksy.
We’ve dug out three compilations of each artist’s work from the abyss that is YouTube, catching their curb-side processes on camera and backing it all up with some sick beats.
Video: Street Art by C215
Playback: Down The Road by C2C
While a vandal destroys, Christian creates. Under the pseudonym of C215, Christian spray paints and stencils his pieces on the world canvas using his surrounds as lexicon, bringing colour to some of the darkest corners of society in just a matter of minutes.
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Video: Street Art by Swoon
Playback: I Love The Drums by Lasse Loöq
Swoons real surname may be Curry, but her preferred consistency is wheatpaste – slapped across her prints to make them stick on an abandoned wall in quick time – giving her artwork a semi-permanent place in society’s derelict spaces. Just as many of C215’s most renowned works feature his ten year old Nina, Swoon’s paper cut-outs often revolve around her family and friends.
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Video: Street Art by Banksy
Playback: Loops of Fury by The Chemical Brothers
Love him or hate him, there is no denying Banksy’s sense of satire and absolute ballsy-ness: casually climbing up a ladder to leave his mark on the 425-mile-long West Bank barrier separating Israel from the Palestinian territories, while armed guards jam round the corner, comes to mind. Street arts’ most notorious and least seen, this vid covers the sneaky artist’s token monochrome epigrams and stencils, and even gives a glimpse of him at work in London.
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Maryam El Gardoum is breaking new shores for Morocco’s indigenous surfers
The Amazigh Atlantic — Through her groundbreaking career and popular surf school, the five-time Moroccan champion is helping women find their places in the waves.
Written by: Sam Haddad
Youth violence’s rise is deeply concerning, but mass hysteria doesn’t help
Safe — On Knife Crime Awareness Week, writer, podcaster and youth worker Ciaran Thapar reflects on the presence of violent content online, growing awareness about the need for action, and the two decades since Saul Dibb’s Bullet Boy.
Written by: Ciaran Thapar
Volcom teams up with Bob Mollema for the latest in its Featured Artist Series
True to This — The boardsports lifestyle brand will host an art show in Biarritz to celebrate the Dutch illustrators’ second capsule collection.
Written by: Huck
A visual trip through 100 years of New York’s LGBTQ+ spaces
Queer Happened Here — A new book from historian and writer Marc Zinaman maps scores of Manhattan’s queer venues and informal meeting places, documenting the city’s long LGBTQ+ history in the process.
Written by: Isaac Muk
Nostalgic photos of everyday life in ’70s San Francisco
A Fearless Eye — Having moved to the Bay Area in 1969, Barbara Ramos spent days wandering its streets, photographing its landscape and characters. In the process she captured a city in flux, as its burgeoning countercultural youth movement crossed with longtime residents.
Written by: Miss Rosen
Tony Njoku: ‘I wanted to see Black artists living my dream’
What Made Me — In this series, we ask artists and rebels about the forces and experiences that shaped who they are. Today, it’s avant-garde electronic and classical music hybridist Tony Njoku.
Written by: Tony Njoku
