Category: Antifa

German stickers and “Street Art Graphics” digital archive update

I spent a few months last winter and spring organizing hundreds (thousands?) of original, unused German political stickers that I’ve gathered since 2013, though some date back 10 or 20 years. Oliver Baudach at Hatch Kingdom, Berlin, who has been my most generous supporter, has given me well over 1,000 German stickers, and seeing his sticker museum convinced me to focus on collecting original, unused stickers whenever possible. I’ve also picked up stickers in Berlin at alternative bookstores, political rallies, May Day gatherings, infoshops, zine fests, and occasionally ebay.de. Several hundred German stickers also came in recently as gifts, with…

FC St. Pauli stickers #2

I did a little more research and polished my previous blog post on St. Pauli stickers for two reasons: 1.) I needed a shorter, condensed version without links to use in the Street Art Graphics digital archive, and 2.) I will use this version in the traveling exhibition, Re-Writing the Streets: The International Language of Stickers.  I can also use this exercise to show students the differences and similarities among a blog post, metadata for a digital archive, and an exhibition text panel. ————————————– Hamburg, the German port city home to the St. Pauli football club (Fußball St. Pauli or…

St. Pauli football club stickers

Hamburg, the German port city that is home to the St. Pauli Football Club, hosts a sports team well known for its outspoken anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic politics and its staunchly progressive activism.  Founded in 1910, the Club is located in the working-class district along the docks near the Reeperbahn red-light district.  For the past 30 years, the team has maintained a certain cult following across Europe, initially attracting radicals, squatters, dockers, and prostitutes in the 1980s, and later, anarchists, punks, bikers, anti-fascists, and other politicized groups.  You can read more at When Punk and Football Collide, Punks, prostitutes…

Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben

One of my students at SLU, Carolyn Dellinger ’16, is starting to catalogue the Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben that I scanned over the summer (see Berlin-based sticker collections in previous post).  From 79 original raw scans, I came up with a total of 48 edited image files consisting of 16 complete stickers, 4 full sheets of “pre-Photoshop” color-separated stickers, and various individual color-separated stickers and overlays.  Carolyn also created seven image files that are diptychs or triptychs to show the color separations side by side.  The 54 image files in this set can be viewed on my Flickr…

Blockupy Frankfurt stickers

Stickers and street posters for Blockupy Frankfurt and Blockupy Deportation Airport (also in Frankfurt) now blanket Berlin. What I find interesting, though, is the contrast between these in 2013 (above) compared to these in 2012 (below).

B2B x 2

B2B = back to blogging! It’s been over a month since my last blog post.  I’ve been a little overwhelmed lately with the flood of information that is available online to the point where I can’t write.  I leave tabs open in Firefox to remember all the cool stuff out there: a new online anarchist archive at the University of Victoria in BC, Canada; a book called OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture; Death and Taxes’s Occupy Wall Street Systematically Ignored by Mainstream Media; AP’s Wall Street protester’s dress as zombies in NYC; Occupy Boston at Dewey Street’s downloadable…

By good fortune

By good fortune or great coincidence, I met someone in the Inuit art world who was actively involved in German street art in the late 1980s and early 1990s – working with others in stencils, stickers, and posters.  He contributed to the publication of “hoch die kampf dem: 20 Jahre Plakata autonomer Bewegungen” (“20 years of autonomous movements posters”) and “vorwärts bis zum nieder mit: 30 Jahre Plakate unkontrollierter Bewegungen,” which on Amazon translates awkwardly to “forward to the down with: 30 years of posters of uncontrolled movements.”  When I put “with others” above, he told me that individuals rarely…

A.C.A.B. stickers

A.C.A.B. is an acronym that stands for “all cops are bastards,” a punk phrase that can be heard shouted at public demonstrations and protests throughout Germany and many counties in Europe.  The formidable police presence at these events gets little notice in the United States, yet hundreds of videos on YouTube depict violent head-on clashes between armed police and unarmed protesters and passersby. In prisons in the United Kingdom and United States, the letters A.C.A.B. can often be found tattooed on the front of a person’s four fingers in clenched fist.  Alternately, in various other contexts, the acronym can mean,…

Silvio Meier demonstrations in Berlin

Twenty-seven-year-old Silvio Meier was murdered on November 21, 1992, by neo-Nazis at the U-Bhf Samariterstraße, a train station in Berlin-Friedrichshain, a district in former east Berlin.  From London’s Daily Mail, November 27, 1992, this was one of over 1,800 racist attacks in Germany that year.  From the article, “according to Interior Ministry figures, 1,483 of these were Right-wing inspired.”  Also from the article: “NOVEMBER 21, Berlin: Silvio Meier, aged 27. A SQUATTER with Left-wing views, Mr Meier was stabbed in a Tube train in the East Berlin suburb of Friedrichshain.  Friends were badly injured after being stabbed several times. Mr…