"Your Opinion" Sounds Like "European"

As she explains it, a series of flashes and wavering pictures race from one to another in a set virtual square behind her head. It’s snow falling and snow playing. Graffiti arting and other things. Speckles of paint fragments hitting the wall like rain drops – in sequence but not in sync – moving from the top to the bottom, from right to left to right again. You can hear the hiss in your head but the sound waves do not transfer. The sound is off. She talks.

Tacheles is an artist collective in Berlin. “Artists can live there without paying rent. Squatting.” As she says it, her eyebrows raise and she sits into a smile and she seems to almost be bragging, but not it a bad way. It’s the way your sister does when you feel like somehow there’s love embedded into this boastful comment.

I love collectives.

“By artists for artists… we just do this because it’s art.” Art has a strange authoritative nothingness in this city, and in this way, it is everything. I’ve seen more art in this city than anything else and I know much more about Berlin’s art than I feel I could ever know about its government. “Communism doesn’t work quite well because there’s this human element involved.” It’s the human element.

The human element.



So here I sit in the office—unknowingly having intruded in a place that seems un-intrudable. My feet rest beneath me, covered with sand and dotted with last month’s garbage: the wrong day to be wearing flip-flops. It’s fine. I like feeling my surroundings between my toes. I hear rock-influenced trance music throbbing in some downstairs room, they probably sit and nod their heads to it as they tap their marijuana cigarettes on the dirtiest ashtray I’ve never seen. I entered this room by stumbling through an invisible door in the wall of an empty room plastered with years of graffiti—I wonder how thick those walls are with art and how they used to look. I see in my mind a sped-up movie of days of busy graffiti artists, with their paint and their rollers, busying these walls with dark color.

I just feels dark but the concept and reality of it is so light.



It’s remarkable to me that no one can ever see a picture as someone who’s been there. And the picture-taker can never see a photograph as those seeing the still frame for the first time out of context with no idea of the temperature, smell, wind, or what’s outside the frame. We say that a picture captures a moment but there’s so much more to a moment than an 8x6 set of pixels varying in color so that our brains register it as a likeness of reality…



Tacheles.de