#StreetArt & #Graffiti The Berlin Wall and the East Side Gallery Berlin

Visiting the East Side Gallery in Berlin was a highlight of our trip. The East Side Gallery is located at the Muhlenstrasse in Frederickshain - many of the photos included in my blog post #StreetArt & #Graffiti #Berlin were taken in this area.  The East Side Gallery is free and public open at all times.  From August 1961 to November 09, 1989 - the Berlin Wall enclosed West Berlin cutting through the city.  Throughout the city, there are markers indicating where the wall stood.

Wall remnants remain throughout the city - at Potsdamer Platz for example.

Other wall remnants on display:

“The East Side Gallery is understood as a monument to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful resolution of boundaries and conventions between companies and people”

— http://www.eastsidegallery-berlin.de/data/eng/index-eng.htm

Thoughts following my visit to the East Side Gallery

Walls are barriers serving to keep people in or to keep the unwanted out.  Barriers long thought as protective also create a numbing sense of isolation from ideas, life, and culture.   Why does it seem that when a regime comes in the first thing they do is attack the cultural centers - museums, libraries, public art displays, street art, graffiti, theater, dance, or music.  Artifacts are destroyed, laws are enacted to prohibit certain creative acts, censorship rises, and the tolerance for those who create decreases.  Call me a mush brain but the symbolism of art placement on the Wall brought tears to my eyes.  So much creativity alongside a historical remnant of barrier and isolation.  

The shear volume of street art and graffiti in Berlin optimistically communicated to me that humans desire to create, they desire a vibrancy and the capacity to voice their inner thoughts.  We will not be silenced - whether through street art, graffiti, poetry, music - whatever form it takes, we will not, cannot, and should not be silenced.

Other Resources

Berlin East Side Gallery Retrieved from http://www.eastsidegallery-berlin.de/data/eng/index-eng.htm

Berlin's East Side Gallery on film.  Retrieved from http://www.dw.com/en/berlins-east-side-gallery-on-film/a-18175320

Berlin Wall Memorial.  Retrieved from http://www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/

#StreetArt & #Graffiti #Berlin

Berlin is a city that holds a great deal of fascination.  I remember the rhetoric of East/West, cold war, and communism.  Our school held drills to gauge our readiness to respond to a cold war initiated attack.  Movies often depicted Berlin as as dark, grey place and the Wall as a symbol of division, deprivation, and oppression.  Berlin - post fall of the wall has an international reputation for street art and graffiti.  The photos included here were taken in May 2014...  the temporality of Street Art and Graffiti suggests that some of these may no longer exist.  For example, the Blu and JR paintings depicted below were painted over in protest to gentrification (December 2014) - See   Why We painted over Berlin's Most Famous Graffiti

So it is that to select a sampling of street art and graffiti representative of Berlin is an impossible task - but here goes.  I encourage you to peruse the complete suite of pictures taken...presented at the end of this post.  

Faces

Graffiti

Stencils and Pasteups

See all the Berlin Street Art and Graffiti pictures taken in May 2014: