Urban Collage
From May 15-25 the Berlinage Residency took place for the first time. Ten artists from different countries spent ten days together in Berlin exploring the city, making collages and exhibiting their unique views in a group show.
Hardly any collage artist travels light. Even when they fly across the Atlantic, they have to pack containers of their favorite glue, scissors, paper, knives, tubes of acrylic paint and pieces of paper that have flatteringly hinted at their importance for future works.
The sun shines through the windows and the tables fill up. In the coffee shop on the other side of the street, the barista prepares flat white in slow motion. All his loving devotion goes to the heart of foam that will be gone with the customer’s first sip.
Someone asks if we’re here in Augsutstraße in the eastern part of the city. “Why the eastern part?” asks Cheryl. I’m perplexed for a moment. Can it be that she doesn’t know anything about the history of the city? I unpack one of my many city maps. The one that shows the sector boundaries that the Allies defined in the spring of 1945. Then I feel an exciting tingle. What will it be like to see the city with such an open mind? What will Cheryl find, with her open eyes, her unbridled energy, her head free of set pieces from the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall?
This diversity of perspectives is what I wished for when I decided to bring collage artists to Berlin to explore together what makes this city what it is, at this exact moment in time. When I decided to finally live up to the name I gave my Instagram account years ago: Kollagenkollektiv. I wanted to spin threads and weave a web of captured snippets of truth and beauty.
Just a few hours later, I am again perplexed as Cheryl begins to create a series of artworks that are hard to beat in their almost iconic Berlin-ness – and which, lying in the shop window, will attract plenty of curious passers-by to the gallery in the coming days. The artist from Seattle collected a few loose cobblestones from a building site, which she transformed into collage sculptures using acrylic paint and small figures cut out of a photo showing sun-seekers on a warm day in the Tiergarten. On a cursory glance, they look like the stones that were chiseled out of the Wall in the first days after it fell, colorful with graffiti on the west side, gray on the east side, where the death strip kept people from touching it. You can still find these stones in souvenir stores today, now probably made in China. Cheryl’s stones also evoke the paving stones thrown in the bloody street battles of the Weimar Republic and the June 17 Uprising, and the slogan “Under the pavement lies the beach” chanted by students during the 1968 riots, who set out in hedonistic militancy to clean up the lingering Nazi domination in the minds and political structures of their parents‘ generation.
How is it possible for Cheryl to capture all this without knowing the story? This reveals a characteristic that works of art have: they know more than those who create them. Collage artworks, which always include material created by others, have this quality to an even greater extent.
Life comes quickly
What Dawn, who comes from Phoenix, can’t know is that the vibrant colorfulness she perceives in the city on these sunny days in May is by no means normal, but a snapshot of Berlin’s spring euphoria. A euphoria that only northern Europeans can really understand, having vegetated in darkness and cold for months and are now finally – finally! – seeing the sun again. But even in supposedly grey cities, colors are omnipresent, Dawn is convinced. “We usually do not realize how much color is out there,” she says.
The contrast between grey and color characterizes her work “Life comes quickly”, which is a textbook example of the magical effect that collages can have. We see a man hurrying past a gray façade. The windows reveal a view – not into the house, but out on something that seems surreal at first glance, but then turns out to be “just” an image of evening city traffic. Through the supposedly simple modification of the everyday, the artist creates a moment of irritation, a brief disorientation that makes us curious and ready to believe that the world is in fact quite different from how we normally see it, enticing and eerie at the same time.
The gallery proves to be too small. Mountains of paper cover the tables, snippets wander from one to the next. Set pieces, laid out by one artist, appear in the work of another. Likewise, elements of posters and notices plucked from the walls of houses, exposed to the weather, pasted over again and again, grown into papier-mâché-like structures like banks of shells on the shore of the sea. This “public paper” is Monica Church’s source material. “I am trying to capture what Berlin is presenting to me” she says.
Monica looks at her work skeptically. “Does it look like it was just pulled in off the street?” Only at first glance. If you take a closer look, Monica’s artistic signature becomes clear. The alignment of the male and female faces in “From the Streets of Berlin”, which form a tense triangle with the cat’s eye, the distribution of the red and blue pieces of paper in a clearly structured composition. The tension between the girlie appearance of pink flowers and light blue hair with the upside-down “Fuck Putin” slogan in ‚Fuck Putin‘. Deliberate condensations that are not created by chance. Monica’s series of works are completely unique artistic reflections of the city with the means of the found.
Material galore
What I learn: As the Berlinage-organizer, I don’t get to immerse myself in my own work the way I would as a participant in a residency. In the weeks leading up to the event, I had begun cutting the streets out of old and new city maps with a fine knife to trace the structure of the city, to explore whether the representations of possible movement bear any resemblance to the energy currents in my nervous system. From the Falk plan from 1989, I cut the bright red band of the wall and the dead straight south-north route from my house on the outskirts of the city to the gallery in Auguststraße.
I wanted to decide what to do with the structures during the ten days of the residency. Perhaps I would link them to streets from the hometowns of the artists who had traveled here? I didn’t really get around to that. Instead, I discovered the hooks on the ceiling of the gallery. The filigree paper networks were now floating above our heads, moving slightly in the breeze and casting changing shadows on the wall.
Adam Wynn roamed the streets of Berlin like an old-school flâneur, cigarette butt-printed trolley in tow, in search of things. He used his days in Berlin to turn his attention to assemblage. “This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now, and the residency allowed me the time, space and experience of the city to explore and create”. A good place for such a project, as there is a lot to find here. Berliners simply leave things they no longer want somewhere outside. Sometimes they go to the trouble of disguising bulky waste with a hand-painted “To give away” sign as an act of charity, but often not even that. Berliners lack the cleanliness of southern Germany, as well as the Hanseatic sense of civic responsibility for the community. Berliners don’t care about the community, just like they don’t care about many other things. It is probably only in Berlin that bags and T-shirts with the slogan “I don’t care, I’ll leave it like this” could become bestsellers. After the first short foray, Adam returns with a meat grinder in its original packaging.
No matter where you go, there you are
Is the artistic experience different in a foreign city than at home? Do the artists feel they succeeded in expressing their experience?
“What I didn’t expect was to not immediately know what I was going to make. For some reason, I was surprised to be faced with exactly the same dilemma I face at home, because, and, no surprise here, I am exactly the same person in Berlin as I am at home!” writes Cindy Borges Warshaw a few days after getting back home. “The only unrealistic expectations I had were about myself. I thought my work was somehow supposed to be dramatically different in Berlin or that it needed to reflect more about Berlin than myself.” It wasn’t until the second to last day that she began to make work that reflected Berlin through her own artistic lens. She began to hone in on a few key elements. She was still drawn to the same bright blues and yellows she has always included in her palette such as those she found in the crumbling facades of buildings. She was still drawn to the idea of building new worlds which she observed at various construction projects around town. And finally, she was still inserting old imagery such as the Berlin TV tower, or a person climbing over the wall, into an environment made of saturated hues and rocky shapes evoking a futuristic, rugged landscape. “In short, by the end of the residency, I had found a way to place Berlin inside my own artistic language of color, texture, and mixed media.”
packaging.
I think Berlinage was a success. In these ten days, each artist has taken something from and added something to the pulsating energy of the city. We have caught beautiful snippets of experience. Sincere in their radical subjectivity. And Berlin will never be the same again.