Huck's top ten skateboarding projects that are changing the world
- Text by HUCK HQ
- Photography by Jess Colquhoun
21 June can only mean one thing: Go Skateboarding Day. To celebrate our favourite day of the year, we’ve assembled Huck’s favourite skate pieces from the last 12 months. From the Belgian skaters proving that Brussels isn’t the ghettoised dystopia the media says it is, to the Swedish girls who bomb rolling hills, we have most definitely got you covered.
1. Skating South Africa’s Valley of a Thousand Hills
Indigo skate camp is giving Isithumba’s very first generation of young skaters a deeper connection with each other and their divided country.
2. The radical career of skate photographer J. Grant Brittain
When J. Grant Brittain turned his camera on his skateboarder friends, he helped kids like Tony Hawk become icons of their time. But it wasn’t just action that kept his lens transfixed.
3. The Mongolians turning skateboarding dreams into a new scene in Ulaanbaatar
More than half the population of Mongolia is under 30. Caught between the expectations of their parents and a future only they can see, skateboarders in Ulaanbaatar are breaking from convention to prove their vision is more than just a dream.
4. Meet the pioneers of Palestine’s skateboarding scene
Can non-profit project Skatepal help unite the youth in a divided land?
5. Girls bomb beautiful, crazy-big winding hills in Norway on longboards
Swedish skater Ishtar Bäcklund takes on Norway’s rolling contours in a new film by Maceo Frost.
6. The story of two young Cuban skaters with one shared dream
To be a skater in Cuba requires imagination – trade embargoes mean boards and materials are scarce. This is the story of two skaters, Yojani and Raciel, who shared the same dream of making it big.
7. A culture-shocked tour of Japan by skateboard
Skaters Ishod Wair, Peter Ramondetta, Raven Tershy and Kevin Terpening rip through three Japanese cities with little sleep and plenty of confusion.
8. How skateboarding is helping to revitalise a village in rural India
Author, futurist and community activist Ulrike Reinhard founded Janwaar Castle to reinvigorate a rural village through skateboarding.
9. Jonathan Mehring is mapping skateboarding’s worldwide spread
Language barriers don’t matter, discovered photographer and explorer Jonathan Mehring, as long as you all speak skateboarding.
10. Teenage Utopia: Skating Through the Lockdown
The Paris attacks pushed Brussels into the centre of Europe’s debate about immigration, intolerance and radicalisation. Ursulines skatepark offers a refreshing counterpoint, here kids from all backgrounds skate together in peace.
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