Berlin-based sticker collections

I went to Berlin this past August to scan street art stickers from Infoladen Daneben and the Archiv der Jugendkulturen, contacts I made from my earlier trip to the city in May-June through a faculty research grant from the German Academic Exchange Service.  I must have spent ten hours during the course of three days scanning stickers….

IMG_2666

The first set of ~30 rare, original stickers from Infoladen Daneben dated back to the early 1990s and were all printed in black and red on yellow paper, though they didn’t have any sort of glue or adhesive on the back.

Infoladen_daneben_08-13_003

They’re actually called spuckis, and from what I’ve been told, you just lick the back and slap ‘em up!  The spuckis I’ve seen before tended to be fairly small with simple text and graphics, though a few similar contemporary spuckis are for sale on the Impact Punk Rock Mail Order Web site.  This fall semester, I’m going to have a student help me catalogue the ones from Infoladen Daneben for the Street Art Graphics archive.  The older spuckis were much larger, and while some were pasted intact on sheets of paper, others had been cut up so that what would have been printed in black were pasted on one page, and what would have been printed in red were on another page.  I.e., “pre-Photoshop” color separations for future print runs.

Infoladen_daneben_08-13_075-med

It looks like the same text, “Kampf dem Faschismus! (Fight against Fascism!), was used on these two different spuckis.

Infoladen_daneben_08-13_057 Infoladen_daneben_08-13_001

I also scanned close to 500 stickers that are housed at the Archiv der Jugendkulturen.  People from the Reclaim Your City collective donated a few thousand original stickers to the Archiv dating from the early 2000s to present day.  On this trip, I primarily focused on socio-political stickers, as well as a small sampling of stickers on street art and street culture (graffiti, music, clothing, etc.).  It will be a much more extensive job to catalogue these stickers, but at least for now I have good scans.  More on this group of stickers to follow.

IMG_2697