Category: Berlin

Sticker exhibition – subjects and topics

It’s too hot today to go back to Cambridge to collect stickers.  (Boo hoo….) I am, however, organizing what I have from my last two trips to Berlin, and here below are the subjects and topics I’ve come up with so far to write about as text panels for the upcoming street and sticker art exhibition.  Some subjects are quite broad, while others are specific to socio/political issues during the last 5-6 years, and still others reference German history dating back to the 1940s.  So many subjects overlap that it’s difficult to sort them out sticker by sticker.  (I can…

SLU students at Hatch – Kat’s post

During the CIIS 2010 trip to Berlin this spring, I asked the students to each write a blog post to add to Stickerkitty.  This one from Kat Dwyer tells about our trip to Hatch Kingdom. “Traveling to Berlin gave us the opportunity to familiarize ourselves with Hatch Kingdom – the first and only sticker museum in the world.  Over the past couple of years, Cathy befriended Oli and Nada, two artists with a mutual passion for sticker art.  The three of us students—me, Charlie, and Bridget—were honored to meet such creative and generous people. We ventured to Friedrichshain, a neighborhood…

“a healthy opposition to ideologies” (I miss my Dad today)

A link from Infoshop leads to a Web site called Little Black Cart, which is a combination blog and shopping cart for books, mags, ‘zines, etc.  Reading topics include: anarchism, communism, culture, green anarchy, situationist, insurrection, anarchy, autonomism, and surrealism.  Here is what they write about Situationists. The Situationists (or Sits) were artists from various countries who formed a group in the 1950s called The Situationist Internationale. They critiqued modern society in its various economic, social, and political aspects. They wanted to bring Marxism up to date, to construct a theory of what was going on in society that was…

Patterns

Having recently watched the 2008 film The Baader-Meinhof Complex, I may be starting to get a better understanding of the historical context and meaning of antifa stickers that I’ve found in Berlin during the last five years.  There is so much I don’t know (so much!) that I wouldn’t dream of trying to write anything in depth about it now.  Christopher Hitchens reviews the film here in his August 17, 2009 article in Vanity Fair (Stickerkitty’s birthday #51). I’ve also been reading Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, which tells the true story of a couple who distributed postcards advocating…

Kittens

By (another) coincidence, I came across Kittens, an English-speaking journal produced within a network called Junge Linke gegen Kapital und National (which translates to “Young Left against Principle and Nation”). Looks like more summer reading for Stickerkitty…. Here is a Junge Linke sticker I found in Berlin in 2003-04.  I’ll dig around for others more recent.

Wooster Collective in Berlin

Too bad my SLU study group and I will miss the Wooster Collective meet-up in Berlin and a chance to meet Marc and Sara Schiller, the NYC-based couple who has done so much to advance street art around the world.  Plus the students would have loved going to the hip Club der Visionaere; they talked about it all the time. No complaints, though.  Our recent trip was fantastic in all respects!!

MediaSpree protest June 5, 2010

During the last day of our study trip to Berlin, Spencer and I found ourselves at the front end of a street protest against MediaSpree.  Well, the front end of 1/2 of the protest, as it turned out that two groups merged together from both sides of the Spree.  MediaSpree involves the commercial development of property along the river in the Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg districts of former east Berlin that is dislocating neighborhoods, squats, local businesses, etc. with big multinational shopping malls, office buildings, MTV, Universal Studios, and the controversial o2 arena.  People are calling it a new wall to…

Photography exhibition at C|O Berlin

The SLU study group — Kat Dwyer, Bridget Montesanti, and Charlie Reetz — and Spencer and I went to C|O Berlin for a photography exhibition entitled Die Stadt, the City.  C|O Berlin is situated in Mitte near the well known Kunst Tacheles alternative arts center.  The exhibition included the work of 18 artists from the agency Ostkreuz who for well over a year traveled to 22 cities around the globe to explore and examine present-day urban realities. From the C|O catalog, “The city: cradle of civilization, melting pot of cultures, mentalities, religions, and ideas, and the locus of human desires…