WOOL Covilhã Urban Art Festival, Lisbon Covilhã , Portugal

WOOL will have a regular event programme related to urban art. Each event will include the creation of a piece in the urban space. The public will be able to follow the process live. Apart from the intervention, the artists will also carry out parallel activities, such as workshops or talks, in order to promote direct contact between artists and citizens.

Being the direct result of two great passions, one for Graffiti / Street Art and other for Covilhã and its history closely related with the textile industry, WOOL | Covilhã Urban Art Festival, appeared in 2011 as the first event with these characteristics in the interior of Portugal under a specific and unique format and modus operandi, aiming to introduce these new expressions of Contemporary Art as tools capable of great social, cultural, economic and urban transformations in a community. Today it is possible to observe a huge number of parallel actions in new geographies (domestic and foreign) and formats targeting different (and unusual) age groups, confirming the value of Urban Art as a tool for rehabilitation (and recovery) of citizenship.

WOOL – The Urban Art Festival of Covilhã, sets out to use several walls in the city as a support for interventions of urban artists, with the aim of:
– Bringing, for the first time, an event of such characteristics to an interior region of Portugal.
– Waking up the interest of the community for culture and contemporary art, specifically, for urban art.
– Providing a new aesthetic appearance to the intervened places.
– Allowing the creation of an urban art route in the city.

Covilhã’s past is closely related to wool and its industry. The city was previously known for the transformation of this raw material in its numerous factories. Apart from paying homage to that past, with this festival we want Covilhã to become an urban art centre at a national level.

The name of the Festival is a pun between the word WOOL and its near-homophone WALL.

WOOL is an initiative of the firm Formas Efémeras, in collaboration with Covilhã Town Hall and financed by the Direcção-Geral das Artes.

Its organisation is run by two native-born of Covilhã and one adopted: Pedro Seixo Rodrigues, Lara Seixo Rodrigues and Elisabet Carceller.