Скачать или смотреть Urban culture on display at Dubai street festival

(22 Feb 2015) A unique festival in Dubai is helping to project a different image of the city.
Crowds turned out over the weekend to witness Dubai's growing urban culture scene at the Street Nights festival.

It's a different side of Dubai that many residents and visitors don't get to see.
Away from the bright lights, tall buildings and shopping malls, Street Nights showcases Dubai's urban culture.
The second annual festival has become a haven for alternative art, dance, music and design.
This industrial area known as Al Qouz was filled with food vendors, local graffiti artists, musicians and independent retailers.
The event was set up by DJ, James Lobito, and under the patronage of the Dubai Food Festival.
Lobito explains the concept behind the event:
"So, Street Nights is for me a very important cultural event because what we're trying to do is make a statement in Dubai to get people out of the mall into the street and experience something outside of the confines of what was normally thought possible in Dubai. So stand up out of your cubicle, out of your workplace get out of the mall, get out of your office out into the street and experience some culture," he says.
It was important for Lobito to support and expose local artists.
"To be honest it's all about supporting independent and alternative culture so on the music side it's really supporting a lot of local artists and we also have some like Arabic MCs, we have MC Toothless who just walked past, so we have a lot of local acts and DJs and bands and musicians. And then on the art side again we're supporting local artists in creating an outdoor gallery because the galleries are very exclusive, they don't support local artists normally, especially not graffiti, there's very few things and graffiti belongs on the street."
Alternative music is also a big drawcard for people.
Kamal Rasool, a Bahrain-Turkish musician living in Dubai has been asked to play a set. He is part of a five-piece band known as Flamingods.
He explains how he became involved with Street Nights: "Well Lobito is a friend of mine and we've talked about playing or collaborating a few times and he asked me to play and kinda just do my thing. We tend to play a lot of exotic music so Ghanian highlife, Afrobeat, exotica, Latin stuff so whatever we get our hands on that we think is weird and exciting to us."
Despite being an alternative event, it has still attracted the interest of larger corporations.
Nissan is the official sponsor of the event, however it had to alter its usual marketing strategies to adapt to this new Dubai demographic.
Nissan provided two vehicles and painted them white so that graffiti artists could use them as a blank canvas in a contest.
The crowd will then vote on the winner. It's the first time the Japanese car company has sponsored this event.
Nissan's Head of Communication, Yolande Pineda says: "It was a very conscious decision for us to take this bold step and be in this probably "not so Dubai" event, but which shows with the crowd that there's a very high interest from maybe something which looks like a little less the classical Dubai and more the underground or side type of events."
Most of the graffiti artists taking part are Dubai-based, with just a handful from other countries.
Graffiti is illegal in Dubai and is rarely seen on the streets, unlike most major cities of the world.
The event was also full of local retailers and small to medium businesses that set up stalls for the event.
Photographer Marvin Caibal came especially to see the graffiti work.
Street Nights was held over two days over the weekend.


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