SOON AT STATE OF DESIGN, BERLIN 2017: THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE LEGENDARY ROADSWORTH, AND HIS PAINTING ACTIVISM THAT REVOLUTIONISED STREET ART

More than anything else it was 9/11 that made Peter Gibson go out on the Canadian streets to become Roadsworth, denouncing ‘a society bent on oil, over-consumption, and hyper-individualism, complacent and unable to overcome its own inertia’, and questioning ‘the hypocrisy implicit in the notion that public space is democratic when in fact it caters more to corporations than it does to everyday citizens’. Despite these high ideas, his stencil-based technique, was open-ended, not preachy, while primarily focusing on street markings and other elements of the urban landscape: “In the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, all I had to do was paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa, to introduce a glitch in the matrix.”

In 2012, Roadsworth’s work was one of the 100 projects with which Max Borka and Mapping the Design World presented a groundbreaking and worldwide overview of social, critical and experimental design, first at the Liège Biennale for Design and Social Innovation, and later during the Vienna Design Week. In the exhibition Now and Then, How Sustainable was my Sustainability?, the second state of DESIGN, BERLIN festival, which will run from June 1 to 4, will reveal the first results of a research into what happened to these 100 projects since then. The exhibition will be part of Total Change, Nieuwe Global Gestaltung #001, one of the two platforms that -next to Alles Neu, Nieuwe German Gestaltung #006- will stand central to the festival. More information is soon to follow on www.stateofdesign.berlin.

More on Roadsworth: https://roadsworth.com/