A female soccer player, who once faced another girl playing soccer, now seems bewildered to find herself addressing a mysterious man wearing a halo of banned currency. No doubt the man was intended to be a statement concerning the current demonetization crisis, but his presence left the girls of the Khirkee Collective, who painted the soccer players, in a dilemma. While the artist who painted the man felt no qualms about painting a mural over the girls’ soccer mural, the collective has a code that forbids them to paint over the work of another street artist. The mustached man must remain and so must some offensive graffiti to the right of the mural. The girls made a plan to rescue their mural another way and met a few Saturdays ago to implement it. Continue reading
Walls
Conversations on the Periphery 1: Wall on Wall
I began this post in November, on the anniversary of the end of the “Antifaschistischer Schutzwand” (“anti-fascist protective wall”) better known as the Berlin Wall. In the summer of 1980, during a research visit to East Berlin, I spent a great deal of time looking at the wall. Oddly I never photographed it, but it crept into some of my photographs anyway. A bit of blurry wall appears among the trees in the background of the Brandenburg Gate. The gate itself is behind a barrier patrolled by a soldier.
After I crossed the checkpoint it took decades for me to look back. I don’t recall seeing the bright graffiti on the west side of the wall. Continue reading
Visual Borders 1: A Separation Fence is Breached
Apparently a fence has been hampering access to jobs, relatives, even shops for people who live on the wrong side of it, while people on the right side of the fence can easily skirt its curving border. It has been doing this for over fifty years. Continue reading