Berlin, the City of Saturated Walls

Street Art in Berlin 8.0, 2018

taken from: Street Art in Berlin Version 8.0 von Kai Jakob Deutsch / Englisch Broschur, partielle UV-Lackierung, 192 Seiten, 349 farbige Fotos Format: 20,7 x 27,4 cm ISBN 978-3-89773-837-9 Über: Wie die farbenfrohe Straßenkunst zu Berlin gehört, so ist auch das Buch „Street Art in Berlin“ von Kai Jakob vom Berlinbuchmarkt nicht mehr wegzudenken. Der ebenso umfang- wie abwechslungsreiche Bildband hat längst Kultstatus erreicht – geliebt nicht nur von den zahlreichen Street-Art-Anhängern, sondern auch den Künstlern selbst. Kai Jakob zeigt die Berliner Street Art aus der Insider-Perspektive – aber nicht nur für Insider. Er beschreibt die unterschiedlichen Stiltechniken, dokumentiert die enorme Vielseitigkeit dieser Kunstform, ihre Dynamik und Intensität und stellt die wichtigsten Künstler vor, die das Gesicht Berlins prägen. Besonders ausführlich werden in der neuen Ausgabe jene aufsehenerregenden großflächigen Werke gewürdigt, die zunehmend ganze Häuser schmücken. Komplett aktualisiert, mit zahlreichen neuen Fotos und neuer Umschlagoptik, die das weltweit bekannte Covermotiv erstmals mit goldener Schrift kombiniert, ist auch die achte Ausgabe von „Street Art in Berlin“ wieder ein echter Hingucker. Mit Kennerblick stellt der Autor und Fotograf Kai Jakob die wichtigsten, schönsten und neuesten Kunstwerke der Berliner Street-Art-Szene vor und beschreibt die aktuellen Trends. Seit zehn Jahren entwickelt sich Jakobs Buch von Ausgabe zu Ausgabe weiter, wird immer bunter und abwechslungsreicher. Doch in einem Punkt hat es sich nie verändert: Es ist der ungeschlagene Marktführer zum Thema Street Art! Street art, art in public space, is a part of the lively Berlin art and culture scene. The photographer Kai Jakob, who has observed this scene for many years, gives an insider’s view of the street art – but not just for insiders. He presents the artwork, portrays some of the most important Berlin artists, and describes their techniques and forms. This is a different kind of art guide through the streets of Berlin – now in a newly updated edition!

SAUC - Street Art & Urban Creativity Journal , 2017

This article addresses some of the challenges faced by heritagization related to graffiti and street art, namely the changes in context and temporality that this process entails. In order to discuss these issues, I will frame the Berlin Wall as a paradigmatic case that presents a trajectory in time: I will follow the transition of the Wall from a deadly frontier to an obsolete structure and, finally, to a historic monument. I will argue that graffiti and street art are context-specific, and deeply affected by the symbolism and/or functions of the surface on which they are inscribed. Moreover, I will recognize graffiti and street art as practices situated in between tangible and intangible heritage. Particularly with the Berlin Wall, and in regard to the preservation of memory and heritage, I will suggest that graffiti and street art do not always enter the institutional circuit, especially when illegal and anonymous.

Many inscriptions, drawings and paintings on the Berlin Wall appeared on its western side in the period between the 1960s and the 1980s. Later, when the Wall ceased to exist, a lot of new and sometimes quite different graffiti were written on some of its replicas. All these images are nowadays often re-used to signify both the former presence of the Wall and its Fall. Yet, they appear to be poorly-studied. The present article aims at analyzing some of the specifics of these images and at revealing their strong power. The author also interprets them as an important precedent opening unexpected possibilities for legitimating graffiti production as a type of imagery capable of signifying human presence and attitude and, at the same time, of representing a city, an idea or a key historic event.

2017

Globalization, Violence and the Visual Culture of Cities, 2009

The aim of this paper is to study the importance of urban street art as an integral component of the city image, rather than being just defined or limited to wall graffiti, it has been extended to contain other forms of arts, compositions, sculptures, and various forms of mural arts, that were applied and integrated an applied on building walls, streets, landscape, fences, street furniture, and many other components of the built-in environment, these various forms of urban street arts represents different values of the society, and reflects various waves of development in political, cultural and socio-economic contexts. while urban street art is considered as a direct reflection of many changes that happens to a community, as the people try to express their impressions, views, anger, etc. in different forms, using street art as a documentation for such movements, and dynamics that happens, whether on the walls of buildings, railway/metro fences, underground stations, and other urban forms as mentioned above. Thus leading to a change in the built in environment features, sometimes positively by adding a more living sense & aesthetic value to it, and sometimes negatively by adding some drawings or writings that only express the feel of anger for example with no recognized aesthetic value, and a third extreme possibility of vandalism. This type of art was always relevant to a certain level of democracy, and political systems that can accept such way(s) of expressions, and in a context that creates art, appreciates arts in general, and use it in expression. While the case was different in other countries, where art wasn’t that important value, and where the political systems deprived people from expressing their views even in the most traditional ways, being involved also in an endless cycle of socio-economic complicated problems, especially in the developing countries, and the image was clearer in the under developed countries. in other words, this means that such type of art was developed in already developed countries, where urban contexts, and architecture were already well established, settled, organized, and all the channels of expression are maturely used by the communities. How this type of art represents the peoples’ culture, values, and the country’s political & economic positions are the different questions this paper is targeting to find the suitable answer, in addition to how it was integrated with the built in environment represented in architecture and urban contexts and adding a living sense to them. on the way to answer the questions of this research paper, the research will make a literature review of the various definitions of urban street art, graffiti, and other forms of street arts, in different contexts, exploring the different experiences from many countries all over the world including arab countries, with an analysis for some of these experiences leading to a further understanding in order to conclude the answers to these questions. Street art is the art on the streets, with all the components of these streets, and with all the streets can do in or for the city, accordingly it’s a very true expression and reflection of the city life, culture, economy & policy. Urban art cannot and does not exist in a vacuum, the built fabric of cities and towns provides the canvas on which street artists exhibit their creations, inextricably linking it to its environment.

2010

This thesis takes as its focus the impact of postmodern critical theory on the vanishing Berlin Wall and on the work of selected German artists working before, during and after the fall of the Wall. It discusses the Wall itself as a sign that has been subjected to various discursive ...

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1999

IT there is a city that symbolizes best the history of this waning century and the challenges of the new millennium, it must be Berlin. Berlin has been a subject of many books throughout this century, but even more so since the fall of the Wall (see for example, Ladd, 1997; Richie, 1998). With its ambiguous past, controversial presence, and uncertain future, Berlin as a preferred topic in the discourse on German cities has now overtaken Frankfurt. Rightly so: no other city underwent changes in terms of spatial, economic, social, and political relations as dramatic as Berlin did in the past few years. This German city challenges us to rethink city-building processes under the impact of globalization. The fall of the Wall in November 1989 not only symbolized the physical-material end of a divided Germany, it also marked the beginning of a new Berlin. Bcrliners, literally overnight, had to give up their fairly comfortable life in a highly subsidized city both in East and West (Campbell, 1999) and had to learn fairly quickly how to deal with the real-existing conditions of the global economy and of a free marketplace. Whereas other cities got exposed to the pressures of a booming economy during the 1980s, with one of the main release valves being the real-estate market, (West) Berlin was very much left out of these dynamics. On the other side of the wall, in the capital city of the GDR, land as a commodity did not really exist. With the fall of the Wall, all this, of course, was under pressure of change. When the mercenaries of the global economy were scouting out opportunities for real-estate investment in the shadow of the trembling wall, it became obvious that, in contrast to other places, Berlin was not a city to be conquered easily by the global marketeers. The potential investors were confronted with deeply grounded local traditions of how to use and produce space as well as a system of landownership that was in flux. On a number of levels, from the lack of institutional frameworks and planning routines for the demands of the new investors (Lenhardt, 1998) to a genuine critique of urban redevelopment by a lively alternative scene and a strong squatter movement (Sambale and Veith, 1998), real-estate development in Berlin was not an easy task. Although the new investment in Berlin's future was greeted emphatically by the movers and shakers of this city, it was condemned by others: the alternative scene, the squatter movement, the peace movement, and a large number of critical urban intellectuals (Eick, 1995; Strom, 1995). The books by Bruno Flierl and Uwe Rada have to be viewed in this context. They pleasantly stick out of the bulk of publications on Berlin's most recent transformation because they add a dimension that is often lacking in the critical-analytical literature: the perspective from within. Both authors not only describe and analyze city-building processes in Berlin but they are also actors within these processes. Flierl is an urban intellectual and architecture critic from the East who is a member of the Stadtforum (a place for expert discussions on urban design and planning in Berlin). Rada is a selfproclaimed "freelance squatter" who, in his day job, works as a journalist at the leftist p

2018

What is the role of art in the reinforcement or rejection of current models of public space management in our cities? To answer this question, we must attend to the ties of all artwork with public institutions, and whether or not it questions the dominant order. In this article, I will focus on the works of the Ana Botella Crew, a group of artists from Madrid, as an example of "artivism" that challenges the City Council's management of public spaces in Madrid. My aim is to explore how useful internet tools can be to articulate artistic interventions that challenge the hegemonic uses of public space, in what Sassen has called the global city.