Wes Mapes

Wes Mapes is an artist who creates mixed media artworks, paintings, sculptures and installations. He draws inspiration from a vast pool of influences ranging from post-colonial theory, alternative history, mathematics, modern architecture and Pan-African identity. He graduated with a master's from the Sandberg Institute’s Radical Cut-Up programme in 2019.

Concrete Blossom x Het Nieuwe Instituut

This three-part series of video essays and podcasts is a collaboration between Concrete Blossom and Het Nieuwe Instituut and is part of Concrete Blossom’s podcast series Life at The Niteshop. The podcast episodes are recorded in The Niteshop: the first knowledge centre for urban culture in the Netherlands.

Life at The Niteshop

If you are familiar with hip hop culture, you are familiar with the fact that it is a world where everything gets remixed. From imagery to language to space, everything changes into building blocks that are used to create new worlds. Since its rise in the 1970s and 80s, hip hop has passed through the hands of many generations of young people who transformed it into a tool for social-cultural alchemy. It represents the power to challenge a world that is not made by you, and is not for you to change. Think of fashion, media, and other domains that could follow. Through Life at The Niteshop, listeners will learn how exponents of urban culture, aka The Culture, are developing new languages and knowledge from the position of underdog that have the potential to change society.