Cool eco-streetart or smart soap commercials?

What's all those 15 year old kids running around with buckets and spouses by night? It's the new graffiti hype, stupid.

Having a respectful amount of creative streetwaste on my account, I've always been a bit worried about the environmental effects of graffiti. The anti-graffiti propaganda claims tons of cleaning costs for graffiti, and maybe the're even a bit right. Time to get some more environmentalist ideas into the urban art movement and rethink our creative re-shaping of cities.

An excellent environmental form of streetart is drawing clean in dirt. You take a dirty urban canvas, and get your stencil down on the dirt. Reversed streetart is a project by UK streetartist "Moose" alias Paul Curtis.

Cool idea, just a shame that the best new streetart ideas nowadays too often merge with advertising agencies. In this matter, ecosoap brand Green Works. And Moose is not only a streetartist, but in the same function running his "innovative advertising agency" Symbollix, with clients like Microsoft and Channel4.

A great concept for greenwashing your company, literally.

Via: Karmakonsum. In his blogpost, Christoph admits he's been one of those graffiti kids too.
Any more in the sustainable bloggosphere with a graffiti or streetart background? Might there be a strong correlation? Leads awareness for urban environments to environmental thinking and living? Or are our blogs just another form of leaving our traces...?

500 Godz: Berlin Streetart Shirt Label with Organic Prints

The new Berlin based ecological shirtlabel 500 Godz has a close connection to the street art scene. Their first collection of organic shirts are printed with works by the British graffiti artist AME72.A new collection will include prints of works by the German streetartists WOW and Ame 72.

Organic Screen Printing
The printing on the shirts of 500 Godz is certified organic, printed by the British T Shirt & Sons, with clients such as Katharine Hamnett and Greenpeace. T Shirt and Sons claims to be the only textile printer able to offer certified organic printed garments in Europe to global organic textile standards (GOTS).

Where a lot of screen printers promise some kind of sustainable approach, still most screen printers use polluting methods. In Berlin there has been a boom of small semi-ethical shirt labels using American Apparel or Continental Clothing shirts for their funky prints. I like the movement and the shirts are cool, but I think they could go for a bit higher ecological standards here. If you want to create an ethical shirt label, you better choose organic, and also take care of a sustainable screen printing method. 500 Godz proove it's all possible, also for a small Berliner shirt label.

Berlin street art revisited

Huge monsters, political drawings, metal installations, mysterious signs: some years ago we discovered street art in Berlin was something exciting and attracting. It was everywhere. And it had a glimpse of avant gardism. We liked to play around in the city, finding all kinds of objects, being surprised by all the things made in the many open spaces the city has. Meanwhile street art found its way into galleries and books and most of all in the form of guerilla commercials. Around the launch of the movie Borat, one could find the image of Borat sprayed and glued in cities all over Europe. The street art techniques are used as techniques for commercial usage, branding and marketing. But what is left of all the wonder in the city when even the nice, small drawings of birds could hide a commercial message? When street artists have to fear for police helicopters and imprisonment? And the rest of the street art scene hides in galleries or in projects funded by the Berlin municipality?

Since we got back from our trip, we looked with fresh eyes to our area Kreuzberg. What has changed? What is happening? This summer there are two large street art exhibitions in Kreuzberg: Backjumps and Planet Prozess. Backjumps has been two times before and this is announced to be the last edition. Both exhibitions are accompanied by several workshops and projects taking place on the streets. Legal and illegal pieces are created, and in case of the Planet Prozess, the exhibition is centered around actions made in the city. Although it is really great to see such an attention for street art, both exhibitions are disappointing. Backjumps leans quite on the artistic aspects of ´writing, and the only highlight I find is a project where German, Cuban and Brazilian street artists cooperate. Here one can find the only accurate thematizations of street art as a fore fighter of free speech and expression. But one could make the wrong conclusion: free expression is a struggle for Cuba, not for Germany.

Berlin streets are alive, but if you would compare the same area of Kreuzberg between 1970 and now, one would say: wow, this is getting a chique area. Even the slummy corners of Kreuzberg are preparing for gentrification. And street art is on the run. Most illegal works are ugly tags, as graffiti is more and more criminalized. A lot of great street artists have gone the commercial way. Most free spaces have been occupied by commercials, other places have become shops or bars. So, what is left of street art here anyway?

A lot. Berlin is a crazy city and even in the chique streets of Mitte, one finds a lot of nice pieces of unplanned art or forms of living. Just between two streets, someone built a two floors tree house, put up fences and grows a vegetable garden (see picture). There is still a lot of surprises to be found. The magic of this city is still alive, but it needs a more political approach. What about the declining space for art in the public domain, what about the commercial use of guerilla art? How can commercial companies such as Nokia, using street art as a way to brand themselves as cool, be sponsors of these exhibitions? It is time to invent new urban art tactics and reclaim street art. Come on, creative people of this city, we can do better! Let´s jump forward!

This travel diary will be continued. We will publish reports from Berlin and the rest of the world regularly, focusing on the themes of sustainable and creative forms of working and living, visiting alternative communities and writing reports of subcultural developments we find urgent.