Our Here, Now column looks at trends taking hold in cities around the world. Given how different the world looks these days, we're focusing on the feel-good moments emerging in between.
On Tuesday, March 17, the day after Germany closed its borders in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19, street artist B.S. grabbed his spray cans and headed for the section of the Berlin Wall at Mauerpark, a bohemian hangout along what was once the militarized Death Strip border between East and West Berlin.
Unlike many muralists, he seldom plans what his work will look like in advance, but there was one topic he couldn’t get out of his mind that day. Several hours later, the finished piece, called My Corona, depicted two gloved fingers on the verge of touching—a Seussian spin on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, splashed onto the 800-meter Hinterlandmauer segment of the Berlin Wall that runs through the park.
“There are some people out there that make art because they want to open people’s eyes or make a difference in the world,” B.S. says. “I make art because I need to. It’s cathartic. It’s my form of expression and if I don’t do it, it messes with my head.”
As Berlin braced for a partial lockdown through April 20, other muralists also took the opportunity to leave their statements on the wall. Around the same time that B.S. was putting the finishing green, purple, and golden swirls on his mural, Eme Freethinker, a Dominican artist who’s been doing street art for more than two decades, added a few coronavirus-inspired works of his own. One showed Gollum from Lord of the Rings gleefully hoarding toilet paper; another featured British actress Michaela Coel telling everyone to “#Stay the Fuck Home!”
“The first time that I came to Berlin, I went to Mauerpark and I spent the whole day just painting there,” says Eme Freethinker, who moved to the city for the street art scene. “It represented so much for me to paint in such a historic space.”
Since the collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989, street art has played a powerful role in Berlin’s cultural evolution. Artists have used the medium to decry everything from fascism to gentrification, to stir up controversy and to process shared trauma. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1991, 118 artists from 21 different countries created over 100 murals along one of the section beside the River Spree. This area is now known as the East Side Gallery, and is the largest open-air gallery in the world.
But while the murals on the East Side Gallery are an open-air monument, the section of the Wall in Mauerpark is a blank concrete canvas open to anyone. ("It feels like all of the street artists in the world have painted on this wall,” says Freethinker.) Like the city itself, this Wall is in a constant state of transformation—some murals last mere hours before being painted over to make way for new ones.
“Mauerpark is a total free-for-all, but that’s part of why I like to paint here,” B.S. says. "I like the thought of [the wall] just being left to slowly deteriorate,"
A week later, B.S.’s mural has already vanished, though a few other COVID-related pieces, including Freethinker's, have remained—for now. But like the Berliners playing violins or singing Die Gedanken Sind Frei from their balconies, the city's artists know their work doesn't need permanence to have an impact. The wall itself is a reminder enough of what the city has endured, and that its people manage to find beauty in even the hardest of times.
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