When the sun sets on Montreal’s most iconic street art murals, something unexpected begins.
Montreal is already one of the world’s great street art capitals — and projection mapping Montreal is taking that reputation even further. Every summer, festivals like Festival MURAL transform the city’s neighbourhoods into open-air galleries, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors. But for MAPPLIGHTS, the festival isn’t over when the crowds thin out — it’s just getting started.
What MAPPLIGHTS Does at Street Art Festivals
MAPPLIGHTS isn’t a typical festival vendor or sponsor. We’re a creative and technical partner — the team that shows up with projectors, custom-built visuals, and a vision for what a mural can become after dark.
At Festival MURAL and Up Here (Sudbury’s acclaimed urban art festival), our work has included full installation and technical setup of projection mapping equipment, custom visual creation designed in close collaboration with the muralists themselves, and block parties with live DJ sets that turn the projection into an immersive audiovisual experience.
Every project starts with a deep look at the mural — its shapes, its colours, its story. We then build a visual narrative that extends the artist’s original intention into a living, moving, breathing show.
Montreal’s Street Art Festival Scene
Montreal’s mural festival culture is unlike anywhere else in North America. Festival MURAL, held annually along Saint-Laurent Boulevard, is one of the continent’s largest celebrations of urban art, featuring live mural creation, music, and cultural programming across multiple days.
What makes Montreal unique isn’t just the volume of murals — it’s the density of creative talent and the city’s openness to experimentation. Artists like Danae Brissonet, Buff Monster, HateCopy, Ankhone, Osheen, and Luca Ledda have all left their mark on the city’s walls, each bringing a radically different visual language to public space.
And that visual diversity is exactly what makes projection mapping such a powerful next step.
Why Projection Mapping Changes the Festival Experience
Street art festivals are powerful, but they face a fundamental limitation: once the sun goes down, the art disappears into the dark. Projection mapping flips that equation entirely.
When we map a mural, we’re not covering the artist’s work — we’re amplifying it. The projection follows the contours of every brushstroke, responds to the colour palette, and adds a temporal dimension that paint alone can’t achieve. Audiences who walked past that wall in daylight stop, stare, and pull out their phones. The work becomes an event.
This is what we mean when we talk about democratizing access to art and culture. A projection mapping show on a public mural is free, accessible, and designed for everyone — not just gallery-goers or ticket holders.
The Block Party Dimension
Some of our most memorable festival moments have happened not in front of a projector screen, but in the middle of a crowd.
When projection mapping meets a live DJ set, something shifts in the audience. People stop being spectators and start being participants. The light pulses with the music. The mural seems to react to the energy of the street. It becomes a shared experience — exactly the kind of cultural moment that festivals exist to create.
At both Festival MURAL and Up Here, our block party installations drew crowds that had no idea they were about to witness a light show. That spontaneous discovery is, for us, the whole point.
Bringing Projection Mapping to More Festivals
MAPPLIGHTS is actively developing new projection mapping concepts for street art festivals across Quebec and Canada. If you’re an artist, a festival organizer, or a city cultural office looking to add an after-dark dimension to your mural programming, we’d love to talk.
The walls are already there. We bring them to life.
MAPPLIGHTS is a Montreal-based nonprofit studio specializing in video projection mapping on street art and murals. We collaborate with artists, festivals, and cultural institutions to create immersive public experiences.
