How Blind Walls Gallery Navigates Inclusion and Co-Creation

This article was written for Uncover magazine – From Global to Ground (10th edition). You can read the full magazine here. 

Authors:Ilja Simons, Kristel Zegers and Esther Peperkamp are lecturers and researchers connected to the Placemaking and Events research group at Academy for Leisure and Events. 

Murals as creative placemaking tools
BWG's approach to mural making is more than commissioning art. Before realising a mural, research is conducted, often in collaboration with the Breda City Archives, but sometimes drawing directly on input from local residents. Once a story and location are identified, an artist is selected whose style fits the specific narrative and place. Residents are involved in this process, from early neighbourhood consultations to feedback on the design. The result is a form of creative placemaking that aims to give communities a sense of ownership over their own public space.

This approach aligns with the spirit of the Faro Convention, which holds that cultural heritage derives its value from the meanings people attach to it. This participatory approach has always been BWG's starting point. Unlike murals that appear overnight on a wall in some cities to the surprise of local residents, BWG's works are developed in close co-creation with the neighbourhood. 

However, co-creation and community involvement are not simple, and questions about participation and representation remain. The research project therefore focuses on two concrete questions: (1) how are residents involved in the various stages of the mural design process? (2) how do newcomers (specifically people with a different cultural background) relate to the visual and narrative aspects of these works?

Neighbourhood meetings
To explore the first question, researchers observed community meetings and neighbourhood consultations, and conducted interviews with key stakeholders including BWG staff, artists, municipal representatives, and housing corporation Laurentius. What emerged was a picture of considerable variation.

The meetings served different purposes depending on the stage of the process: some were organised to choose an artist, others to give feedback on a design. In one neighbourhood, residents gathered for a presentation in a historic building next to a prison dome to discuss design proposals for a mural inspired by escape stories from the adjacent prison. Another meeting took place at the location of the intended mural: the entrance hall of the apartment building, with design proposals displayed on panels in the space. Organising a meeting in the actual location where the mural will be placed, allowed people to feel the scale, imagine the colours on the wall, and relate the design to their everyday surroundings.

The voting system also varied. Sometimes the process was highly visible, which created a lively atmosphere but also a degree of social pressure. In other cases, residents were approached individually at their doors, allowing for a more anonymous response. Which works best depends on the goal: visibility builds collective energy, while anonymity may give quieter voices more room, including those who never make it to a meeting. But even when residents do show up, group dynamics can work against open exchange. During one meeting, a single dominant resident voiced strong objections to a planned mural, leaving little room for others to disagree.

The level of involvement offered to residents also differed from project to project. In one case, the theme and the artist had already been decided before the first community meeting. In others, residents were involved from the very beginning. This raises a key question about what co-creation actually means in practice, and how much of the process is open. 

Newcomers’ perspectives
To explore the second research question, focus groups were held with newcomers, in collaboration with the organisation Buddy to Buddy, as well as with international students with diverse cultural backgrounds, who were taken on a guided tour of BWG murals and then invited to reflect on what they saw. Their responses were rich, layered and sometimes unexpected.

Some participants responded primarily to aesthetics: the colours, the composition, how a mural related to the building it was painted on. Others connected the murals to their own personal histories and memories. One participant saw Transformers characters in a painting which triggered feelings of personal nostalgia, another participant recognised symbols that reminded her of Iranian Eastern traditions. A mural depicting a woman with three arms was interpreted by a Syrian participant as a symbol of female strength, “She carries a lot.” And a pattern that appeared to some participants as purely decorative, was recognised by one Iranian woman as a motif appearing on traditional Iranian tiles.

What these conversations stressed is that murals do not have fixed meanings. They function as surfaces onto which people project their own memories, cultural references and life experiences. This is what makes them powerful  placemaking tools. Another observation is that the murals triggered conversations between participants. A mural about Vincent van Gogh’s brother, who lived in Breda, prompted a participant to share what she had read about Van Gogh's letters, translated into Arabic. A mural about justice led to a broader exchange about the importance of justice in general. Learning about Breda's history through a guided tour sparked many different reflections about living in the city. Moreover, some of the women voiced the idea that their arrival and travel to Breda as refugees could also be portrayed in a mural one day, suggesting that the diversity of murals and stories triggered a sense of belonging to newcomers already.

At the same time, not all newcomers automatically felt addressed by murals. A German participant found Breda's murals rather polished and seemingly ordered by the municipality compared to street art and ‘natural graffiti’ in other cities. The opposite was voiced by a Dutch participant who noted that the murals felt more cohesive in other cities, where a unified visual language helps tell a collective story. Both these points raise questions about what it means to make a city legible and welcoming for people who arrive with different visual cultures and expectations.

Towards a toolbox
At the time of writing this article, the project was still ongoing and data was still being collected. A mapping of existing toolkits for participatory placemaking practices found that most of them are designed to evaluate single projects, rather than the kind of living, evolving process that BWG runs. That distinction is important because a mural does not stop making meaning once it is finished. New people walk past it, interpret it and bring new associations to it. The guided tours themselves generate meaning. As the researchers observed, the conversations that happen in front of murals are sometimes as important as the images themselves.

The aim of the project is to translate these insights into a practical toolkit for creative professionals: tools to reflect on and improve representation in co-creative processes, and that acknowledge mural-making as a process that continues long after the mural is finished. Because the question BWG has been asking since 2015, “how do you make a city's stories visible?”, inevitably also includes: with whom and for whom. And as cities continue to change and diversify, that question will only become more relevant.

KreativEU Walking Seminar
In February 2026, the Living Stories project hosted three days of a KreativEU Walking Seminar at BUas. Participants from European partner universities took a mural walk, discussed street art across Europe, and tested art-based tools. Finally, they visited Blind Walls Gallery FilmFest, where practitioners from across the world gathered around the theme of murals and public space.

Mural artists
Simon Mannaerts
Joren Joshua