UPDATE APRIL 2022: A lot changed meanwhile and this Vagabundler Project became a networking collaborative creation where passionate art lovers from all around the world started taking part. And it is still growing. Wonderful! Frank Hofmann is building up the Hamburg Map with more than 1300 spots and 9000 photos, Salvador Seda from Chile is doing an historical documentation about the graffiti world in Angol via the Angol Map, Holger Peter from Berlin contributes fabulous murals and character artworks for the Berlin Map with excellent recherche and at the moment with more than 5900 pages and over 47.000 photos. Patrice Loranger works with wonderful storytelling about the artworks on the Montréal Map, Milau Lutumba aka Delutu takes great photos and movies in Paris, Agnieszka Pisarska creates various articles and several maps all over Poland and Mazzanti contributes content from Stockholm. Fiona Lu from Canada joined and is building up the great map of Vancouver, Caley Costley works on fabulous artworks from Los Angeles. With Luigi Savoia we just started the Map for Turin, with Analía Pertusi aka Perts Jam there grows an fantastic archive on the Buenos Aires Map, photographer Julien Canadas brings great photos with additional videos for the Toulouse Map and Bart Hagel aka Street Art Damsko works on the Amsterdam Map. Fantastic urban artworks from Australia photographed by Natalie Pomeroy aka Streetart Wombler are on the Melbourne Map and beautiful Ecuadorian urban art gets regularly contributed by Gail Lochner from Cuenca. With Mike Hennessey aka See Some Streetart we started to create the Map for Almaty in Kazakhstan. And there are a few more … A new version on this “About Text” will soon be updated here, because meanwhile this idea has become a wonderful flourishing project in which many creative and heartful people from all over the world are constructing together. If you want to participate, just write us to info@vagabundler.com. You can check the several city maps here, some of the contributors have already own profile pages in the culturists section. Besides that you will find now regularly published articles and interviews from the whole team!
Our Mission – Why are we doing this here?
First and foremost, we are lovers of art, colors, diversity and creativity. In addition to the joy of observing, we also enjoy taking photos. And that’s not even enough, we want to show it to others too. But for us, it’s not just about our photos, it’s much more about the motif itself, what’s behind it and also about those who made it. This online platform is a collaboration of many creative, lovingly people from all around the world, who are passionately involved in this non-profit project. Partly it comes out of our own interest, but we all in the team have a strong additional motivation and a will to make urban art and everything that it defines and entails better known and to provide information about it. In addition to the photo galleries, we try to let the artists and makers have their own say in interviews. The Vagabundler collective is a small family interested in creativity that informs, documents and archives. Many works of art in public space are no longer available after a short time, and often there are not even photos of them. This website offers a database of beautiful works from places around the world. Apart from the art perspective, which already is a huge reason why the works have to be documented, it is clearly also a socio-cultural phenomenon. It has to be reported on and we try to mediate, explain and create access and maybe even connections. Urban art and art in general is a form of human expression in our society. There is great value in it and there are many messages included. We try our best to show you this fantastic colorful world and the creators behind, to explain it and to bring it closer to you.
2021 – The Vagabundler Crew – An International Collective
Facebook Posting from 26th July 2021: A few words about the Vagabundler project and all the interesting things that have happened in the meantime. Over 1000 articles, 70 country maps, 38 city maps, 7700 individual pages and far more than 100,000 photos later. I am overwhelmed, excited and also very proud of our creative and international team! Thank you to everyone involved in this project! Despite the many unceasing negative events in the world, something very beautiful has also emerged here. Last year in March I was in Ireland with Frank Hofmann when all this shit with Corona started. With him, the expansion of the project began, so to speak, Frank now populates the Hamburg Map (currently over 1000 spots) and writes extensive articles. We still had great encounters in Dublin with the graffiti artists Kevin Bohan and Pens on site while a spray session in Ireland, but then I had to break everything off in a hurry and almost panicked back in time before the borders were closed. For the next few months, there shouldn’t be any travel-like plans possible, or rather you couldn’t actually even leave the house for just a very long time. Well, then I just started to be creative and got busy with other ideas whch you could do from home. It would have happened sooner or later anyway that this “Vagabundler Project” would grow into a bigger network because it was designed and planned that way from the start. The concept was to build up a great magazine, an interesting archive, a database, a smorgasbord of entertaining stories. For those who are just interested in those things. And made by people who are also passionate about it. But with a special focus on street art and graffiti. I started with some first puzzle pieces, but then more stones came from other people. And step by step it beautifully evolved. With all these lockdown stories around the world, we started communicating in other ways. Traveling or seeing each other was not possible, but you could still work on ideas via internet communication and implement projects and creative things together. Vagabundler, initially a small blog by an individual, has now become a collective, a team, a group, a small family that works together on something with a lot of passion. In addition, many people contribute with individual photos or writings. That’s very nice and I’m really very happy to see how this project and this idea is growing and thriving. Despite the current situation, which doesn’t seem to be stopping, there are also many positive things. I don’t want to say that a team wouldn’t have formed around this platform even without Corona, but it turned out very differently than expected. It has even intensified many things. And in a good way, with even more deliberation. Despite lockdowns and social distancing, we were able to create things together and thanks to the internet, we weren’t that far from each other anymore. I would like to introduce you to the individual people here, check them out if you are interested. And if it doesn’t interest you, then watch it anyway, maybe you’ll suddenly discover things that are suddenly interesting after all. Well over 100,000 photos from more than 70 countries are online on more than 10.000 individual pages and more than 100 maps. Countless extensive to short articles, reports, interviews, audio podcasts or videos are included. With a lot of research work on background information and links to the artists and cultural workers. Sometimes just photo galleries, sometimes very detailed reports or even just an amusing story. Some team members already have profile pages, some send photos for posts, others write extensive articles and others build entire graffiti maps to a city with lots of background information about the creators of the works. We try to support the art and culture scene, especially the artists and creators of the works, also the organizers of events and owners of art spaces. We do that by providing information, presenting works, explaining the background and showing how cool it is. Most of all we want to show, that creativity is everywhere, all over the world, in each of us. We humans can do both. We can destroy and we can create. With Vagabundler we definitely promote creativity and want to motivate everyone to be creative themselves, as well we try to support the ones who already are.
Crew Members, Contributors & Supporters – Creative Art Family
How it started in August 2017: What is “Vagabundler” ?
Hello Visitors! I want to introduce my Vagabundler Project, my writing and myself to you. My name is Gunther Michels, I am a journalist and live in Frankfurt, Germany. I love to travel and to produce documentations about it, as well I have a special fable for streetart and graffiti. Actually it all started with a journey to Australia after school. Once I got in touch with exploring the world some strange and strong curiosity took over and since then I keep on travelling and backpacking as often as possible. My masterplan is to see every country in the world. Next step would be to see every state in the world and maybe every city…. I don´t know, I think the plan isn´t really made for reaching an end. It´s just my passion.
During my travels with usually longer distance routes inside the environment I am not enjoying the culture and nature only for myself, I developed beeing a journalist and I want to circulate the information. So I take photos, make movies and record interviews with the people I meet (mostly by accident) and about the situations I sense in my perception juicy. I want to inform my friends and the ones who are interested about other cultures and motivate them to travel more by themselves. If more people would travel more – and not only the two-week-all-inclusive-style – everybody would have less problems understanding each other and the differences between us.
For writing about and presenting my travel experiences I started using several social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on. Every platform has something nice, interesting and special in usage. At some you can show your fotos, others are better for interaction with other members. Still there was something missing in the way I wanted to introduce my content and reportages. I started writing for the German online magazine Feinripp (doesn’t exist anymore), there I could combine text, photographs, movies and as well audio interviews in podcasts. Fantastic and a good combination. I was still not happy about it and since there are some new and easy apps for Google Maps in website building I started my own homepage in October 2017 in English: www.vagabundler.com. I am open for your feedback and I would appreciate your opinion about the page very much. Write me Emails to: info@vagabundler.com.
One big advantage I have now is that I am able to put in trackers on the map myself. Here is an example for Ghana.
And another one for Japan:
On Google Maps you can search for doctors, for restaurants and mechanics. But there are not really maps for streetart and graffiti. On my trips I asked the locals and tried to find the nice spots by searching, but often I didn´t discover the hidden ones. I would have been happy a lot of times for some kind of map or something on my smartphone with the locations of this places. With this kind of streetart map somebody could even make his own walking route through an area. My idea of a streetart tracker map was born and I added this to the website as a last level in some cities where I have enough footage. Here is an example of the meanwhile uploaded content for the Streetart Tracker and City Map of Frankfurt where I live. I have so many many many more pictures to upload and it´s still a lot of work to do.
I am continously working on the uploads and the page. Now I can really combine all the different media instruments. I can put in the articles, the photographs, the writing, embed audios and movies, and I can even add the special maps with routes and trackers. It´s awesome for presenting and giving access locations and backround storys to interested travellers and streetart lovers.
Sometimes there are single photos with no big text, sometimes there are heaps of pics with a lot of talking about it and in other articles you can find big reportages with audiointerviews and movies. I travel constantly and I am just obsessed with streetart and graffiti. I love to search for it and to take photos of it. Half of my friends are working in the graphic design sector, are sprayers themselves or do art. I am the journalist and photographer who is presenting their doings. And I present as well a lot of doings of people I don´t know. Therefore feel free any time to comment on my posting names of artists, links to websites or as well photos of the same object you did yourself.
If anybody still wants to know how I look like, here you go:
Okay…. ? … as well without camera…
