28 Apr 2008

Diesel Wall

Diesel Wall Manchester
Diesel Wall Manchester

The fashion brand Diesel have picked up on the outdoor, big wall format with a creatively focussed competition, Diesel Wall, to fill the spaces they’ve booked on prominent locations in Manchester, New York, Zurich and Barcelona.

The underlying premise is a revolt against the ‘pollution’ of public space with commercial messages by providing a canvass for more ‘worthy’ art. The brief is quite simple for each space:

“Create an original artwork, designed specifically for this place.”

The most intriguing, in terms of profile, is the Zurich wall which will be produced in time for this summer’s Euro 2008 football tournament from where it will be highly visible from one of the stadia. Sadly the entry deadline for this competition is closed but the other three are still open. This isn’t the first time they’ve run the competition, the last walls featured were in Beijing, Copenhagen, Milan and Toronto. You can see the winners here [Update: Diesel Wall website has been taken down, try searching for Diesel Wall to see images].

It’ll be interesting to see what techniques they use to paint/print/mount the respective walls, each looks to require a different format. It would be cool if they could pioneer the emerging technology of “SmartWrap™” with their next competition in 2009…

Have a look at this video to view the manifesto:

Subscribe to my newsletter for news, events and projects from the world of ghost signs. I curate the newsletter roughly monthly and welcome submissions.