ETTELBROOKLYN - Street Art in Ettelbruck

Street art brings life and inspiration to our cities. This art movement, known to the general public mainly in the form of graffiti, includes all works of art created in public spaces. In Ettelbruck, a tour is dedicated precisely to this form of art.

Creative Capital of Northern Luxembourg

Ettelbruck engaged strongly in 2017, when Mantra, a young self-taught painter of the French graffiti scene, brought within the Kufas Urban Art project the first soul to a wall in Ettelbruck. He pays tribute to nature and his childhood heroes, the butterflies.
Alex McKell grew up in England and painted in 2018 a geometric whale close to the church. Her mural is a daily reminder of the sea-life we share our planet with. Her art reflects the idea of the “clean ocean”, an ocean without plastic.
In 2019, the Luxembourgish illustrator Alain Welter redesigned the façade of the General Patton Memorial Museum, and Sandra Biewers, a young artist and tattoo specialist, created in Place Marie-Adélaïde her biggest ever work.
Vidam, an illustrator and designer from Berlin, used aerosols to paint a “school-squirrel” in 2020, drawing inspiration from a classic 1980s cartoon. This work is located by the Äschenhiwwel monument.
Beginning 2021, Fabio Lopez Gonzalo, alias Dourone, and Élodie Arshak, alias Elodieloll painted the sidewall of the Café Suprême next to the church and the tourist office. This creation, NYA 00:00’02, is part of the ‘Space-Time’ collection with 2 pictures taken from the model Nya, with 2 seconds difference. Dourone pushes us to reflect on the concept of time and speed of the twenty-first century, using references like pixels to create decompositions of movement and with these abstract decompositions to reflect the current life.

open-air gallery

The Ettelbruck City Tourist Office wants to set the framework to engage youth in exploring different artistic directions and give them new perspectives. All of this aims to brand Ettelbruck as the capital of street art in the North of the country.
In September 2021, SUMO, the most recognized artist in the Luxembourg graffiti scene and owner of the gallery1:1, created together with 14 street artists from Luxembourg, Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands, the largest open-air gallery in Luxembourg.
Alëxone, Bo130, Collin van der Sluijs, Cone The Weird, LOOK the Weird, The Caver, Daan Botlek, Dave The Chimp, Nicolas Barrome Forgues, Niark1, Microbo, Nilko, Spike, Stick, SUMO.
During one week, the 15 international renowned artists transformed the entrance of Ettelbruck in an open-air gallery with their artistic interventions on the 2 walls and on both sides of the 7 piers of the Deich bridge. All 16 walls are similar to the artworks that the artists expose in galleries.

WHY ‘Ettelbrooklyn’?

In the '00s, also known as the noughties, young groups from the new artistic wave, R 'n' B, Rap, Break Dance, and Hip Hop created the names of Beverly Wiltz, Bereldangerous, DK City, Dudetown and Ettelbrooklyn, to mark their sector and towns, such as Wiltz, Bereldange, Dudelange, Diekirch and Ettelbruck.
The Ettelbruck City Tourist Office re-awakened Ettelbrooklyn to name the first street art festival in town. Especially as Brooklyn is famous for its bridge and became a very fashionable district in New York, that attracts young creative minds. This vision of Ettelbruck, known for the blue bridge, is to become the most creative city in the north of Luxembourg. The festival and the street art help to bring some color and dynamic into town.

HARIKO ETTELBRUCK

Hariko is a mix between "HARIBO" ("Kids and grown-ups love it so, the happy world of Haribo") and "Boun" (from Bouneweg / Bonnevoie), the vegetable (bean). The name reflects the playful character of the project that was inspired by Bronx regeneration project “The Gramsci Monument”. Hariko was founded in 2015 at a former warehouse in Bonnevoie in Luxembourg city, as an outreach service to offer cultural activities and “help young people open up”. Hariko opened in 2019 in Ettelbruck and provides rent-free space to 6 artists in exchange for which tenants offer free workshops to young people. HARIKO is now part of the Youth Program of the Luxembourg Red Cross.