Urban Nomads

Techno-trance music blast through the white sand filled court, scattered about are industrial scraps-turned-art pieces that make up the furniture and décor pieces for this hipster-artist oasis. The blinding daylight cast a hazy veil across this urban land; my feet kick up small clouds of sand as I stumble my way to a bench. Those damned mosquito bites. As my eyes shift around, I half expected one of the inanimate objects to come alive while “I Am the Walrus” spill through the speakers, alas, wishful thinking.

Giant letters in rusty metal spell out ‘ANDBEAT’ next to a patio. The ambiguity of the sign spoke so honestly of Tacheles, a place that, if described, would best begin with a conjunction. Parts of the surrounding buildings still appear as if it had just stepped out of the shadows of war, with decapitated statues and a fractured façade, the stones reeked of Berlin history: war, wall, and all. However, the coats of graffiti and canvases pointed towards a new direction, a location (however, temporary) for nomadic urban artists and art-seekers alike. A gem in a large city, nonetheless, a secret art garden where even Peaches herself resides (when she’s not in rehab, perhaps?).



I stayed pretty quiet on this trip, mainly because my mosquito bites were irritating me beyond the thought of ants in one’s pants, but also because I felt my talking would be disruptive to the music and the creative energy surging through the air. I was also in one of those states of mind where your thoughts are fleeting and it’s hard to grasp onto them long enough to form them into cohesive sentences and expression (maybe it was just the itching speaking). So, I decided to not fight it and to tour this place lost in my own thoughts.

On the other side of the courtyard, I discovered the shacks where artists have taken their work to be put in an informal type of gallery for the public. I kept my camera in my pocket, but couldn’t find the courage to pull it out. In fact, it was a bit overwhelming for me.

The entire time I was thinking of my friend, Joel. He would probably find his home here. The metal sculptures that were once blank faced pieces of scraps left over from (re)construction have been meticulously welded, bent, formed and shaped into identifiable objects: a woman sitting down, the folds of her skin enhanced her feminine figure, I could almost see her take in a breath; some sort of creature that resembled something from Alien vs. Predator, a bass-treble-cleft-and-half-note-unified-into-one, and other pieces that could only derive from an individual's deep abyss.

Like these pieces of scrap-turned-artwork, Joel is a master craftsman at using what would seem to be useless, to be his medium when he creates his own art pieces. A project Joel started on last summer after he got out of the hospital were these head sculptures. He would go to beauty supply shops and purchase Styrofoam mannequin heads, take them home and from there gives them an identity. He masks their plain surfaces with texture and expression, using leather, fabrics, wires, fake vines and pretty much whatever household item he can find, and stitches them together with hot glue or a year’s worth of staples. Even despite the layers of cardboard that would become this head’s skin, he could work past its stiffness and mold emotions onto their expressions. I can imagine him sitting in the living room ripping, cutting, fitting, gluing away as a way to settle with his thoughts. Once you notice just how detailed these sculptures were, you can tell that it was made with a lot of thought and care, and through his crafting fingers, he found therapy in this.

He would always excitedly invite me to come over and check out a new head he’s made whenever I would come home from school for breaks. I loved seeing his face light up with pride whenever he’d unveil to me his new work.

It’s an unsettling feeling to realize the paradoxes that lie within art. While the piece can be timeless and universal, with the constant shift and change with time, its concept can become either accepted or rejected. This gray area makes it vulnerable for a sense of impermanence to set in. The audience and the artists themselves may feel that the art is outdated, and like most things, you have to keep moving on. Maybe this is part of the reason why these artists are constantly put in the position to have to relocate and find a new home for themselves (aside from issues of legal property and fiscal matters). While I am no Art buff, I do think the generalization out there is that art has an obligation to continuously keep up with the times, and when it fails to do so, it gets left behind, discarded and sometimes forgotten by the greater society. And, perhaps just like the artists that occupy these stations now, art can easily be taken for granted, seen as momentary and marginalized. This may sound a bit too irrelevant with what really is going on, but I feel like it acknowledges the paradigm of Berlin: it is so greatly entwined with its historic past and yet coexists in this current that keeps sweeping it forward in time.

For now this is a realm for escapism. Like how Joel finds solace through crafting, I’m sure that these artists share a similar intimacy with the work they create and the process in which they create it. Whether this place will still exist in the next month will be entirely up to fate, although it truly adds a rich, unique flavor, to Berlin.