BOOK A STREET ARTIST MAGAZINE ISSUE 9 / JUNE-SEPTEMBER 2016
A documentary that explores the courage and creativity of female graffiti and street artists from around the world.
THE BRONX
FRANCE
BRAZIL
ARGENTINA
CHILE
MISS 163
ECUADOR
MO
QUEENS
ZEL
FIO SILVA
ALICE MIZRACHI
PUERTO RICO
VANESSA ROSA
BROOKLYN
ABUSA CREW
DANIELLE MASTRION
NUBE
MEXICO
TYSA
CHILE
PAU
JAPAN
SHIRO
BROOKLYN
GILF!
ECUADOR
BLN BIKE
SPAIN
TXAR BRAZIL
MAGRELA
MEXICO
FUSCA NYC
ELLE
NYC
MARTHA COOPER
PUERTO RICO
VERO RIVERA
NYC / ECUADOR
TOOFLY
WWW.STREETHEROINESFILM.COM @ STREETHEROINES
ECUADOR
VERA PRIMAVERA
QUEENS
LADY PINK
COLOMBIA
LILI CUCA
BRAZIL
ANARKIA
NYC
LEXI BELLA SUPPORT US ON KICKSTARTER!
BOOK A STREET ARTIST MAGAZINE ISSUE 9 / JUNE-SEPTEMBER 2016 EDITORS IN CHIEF Guille Lasarte & Charlotte Specht guille@pantamagazine.com charlotte@bookastreetartist.com ART DIRECTOR Guille Lasarte MARKETING DIRECTOR Mario Rueda mario@bookastreetartist.com CONTRIBUTORS Ingo Albrecht (Diskorobot), Marco Meyer, Mr. Fish, Infidelix, Camille Charlier, UC EAST, JOS*, Alexandra Henry, Maresa Harvey, Carolina Rossi, eL Seed, Stan Herd, David Tampellini, Jumoke Adeyanju, Denis Faneites, Dominic Braun, Stefanie Tendler, Bennet Cerven, Geordie Little, Clara Cabrera, Vidam SPECIAL THANKS TO Ashley McCaskill, Agata Swiezak, Pau Quintanajornet www.pantamagazine.com panta@bookastreetartist.com FOUNDERS OF BOOK A STREET ARTIST Charlotte Specht Mario Rueda www.bookastreetartist.com
Cover illustration & illustration on inside front cover by Mr. Fish Painting on opposite page by Clara Cabrera (bookastreetartist.com/clara-cabrera)
LETTE R FR O M TH E E D ITO R S
We almost scratched the letter from the editors this time around. We were a bit tired of being forced to say something and this time nothing instantly came to our mind that we were urged to say. So instead of giving you some “this issue is about xy” blabber, we just wanted to leave this space blank. Anyways, PANTA issues don’t have themes. Our contributors have no limitations, no frames, no walls. Everything is connected on a more spiritual level, which doesn’t need specific terminology to be presented. But then it hit us: how arrogant are we to skip an opportunity to use our voice? We remembered a quote from issue 5 when we interviewed Herakut: “If you manage to grab someone’s attention, then please seize that moment to get your point across.” So here is our message: have a message, have an opinion and raise your voice loud and clear. Thank you for being a part of PANTA.
GOT SKILLS? www.bookastreetartist.com
ISSUE 9 / CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATION & STREET ART
DISKOROBOT Text by Charlotte Specht Photos by Marco Meyer Illustrations by Diskorobot www.klub7.de/diskorobot bookastreetartist.com/old-yellow
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There is a code that allows you to decipher Diskorobot’s illustrations. Decoding the meaning behind his abstract geometrical compositions reveals a deep look into the artist’s biography. At second sight, his work is a dense interweaving of stories and memories of his life and the title of an art piece acts as a reminder note about a certain time in his past. The artist uses abstract forms and graphical fragments to compose these stories, be it on paper or on large-scale murals. The first substantial wave of influence on his artistic endeavors is a result of his active participation in the graffiti scene in the early 90s in his hometown of Halle Neustadt, a planned city in the east of Germany. This is when he officially began painting, while studying art at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design. He grew up amid a youth movement that used visual and linguistic codes only comprehensible to a limited group of people. Always perceiving music and language as heavily interrelated with graffiti and hip-hop, he soon dived into the use of linguistic elements and started regarding an expression not only as a description for an object or a state, but as a number of interpretations and reflections of a particular lifestyle.
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Surrounded by modernism and not yet understanding the ideology of state-controlled art, new impulses were planted into his creative mind
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DISKOROBOT 13
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DISKOROBOT 15
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With an equally strong impact, the unique developments in his hometown shaped his artistic universe irreversibly: Halle Neustadt is abbreviated “Ha-Neu” by its locals which, spoken out, sounds like the Vietnamese capital Hanoi. While being two entirely different cities, there is a striking similarity: both serve as the exemplification of a “boom city”. Compared to 6.5 million inhabitants in Hanoi, 94,000 seems insignificant – however, not if you take into account that it was built in only 26 years from an open field in the middle of nowhere. Towards the end of the former German Democratic Republic, standardized grid-like architecture had made this astoundingly rapid growth possible. The government put great effort into modernizing Ha-Neu for the families of the workers in the surrounding chemical industries: the new socialist model city was not short of malls, a metro, an elevated railway and 5 to 22-storey skyscrapers. Anyone who grew up here and looked out the window was close to heaven. Ha-Neu became an urban icon of East German post-war modernism and a utopia of equal opportunities for all before the city lost half its population after the fall of the regime.
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Diskorobot continues on an individual path, currently exploring his favorite tools: a feather pen and ink on paper
Art played an important role in the utopian city planning: functional architecture was to be disrupted by over 150 public art projects planned and paid for by the state. Huge, colored, futuristic murals were installed on facades of apartment blocks – one in particular was created by the Spanish artist Josep Renaus and left Diskorobot with an enduring fascination for the combination of colors and abstract geometric shapes. Surrounded by modernism and not yet understanding the ideology of state-controlled art, new impulses were planted into his creative mind. In his artwork “Renaus abstraction”, the artist remembers this crucial impression in his very own style and artistic language. Similarly, the events of autumn 89’ in East Germany inspired him to create “Herbst 89”, in which we get an insight into the emotions of the young artist faced with the fallen wall and an ubiquitous dazzling flashy feeling of “breaking out”.
In the aftermath, the number of inhabitants of his hometown shrank in half in less time than they had risen. A wave of unemployment and demolition of skyhigh buildings followed – a time the artist compares to the legacy of Detroit, a shrinking city with a growing subculture. “Newtroit” was born. At this time, around 1996, Diskorobot and some friends formed the artist collective KLUB7. By synthesizing their individual styles, they have developed their own group style that is both playful and handmade. Meanwhile, Diskorobot continues on an individual path, currently exploring his favorite tools: a feather pen and ink on paper. His ink drawings serve him as a base for his large-scale works on walls. The latest ink drawings show mostly abstract compositions of shapes and refractive structures. ∆
ILLUSTRATION
ARTIST STATEMENT www.clowncrack.com
P
erhaps the best way to describe who I am and what I do as an artist is to explain who I am not and what I try not to do as an artist. For one thing, I am not special because I can draw a horse, a vulva, a rutabaga or a Beatle in breathtaking detail, therefore I don’t assume that I deserve attention or reward for my ability to do so. Broadly speaking, I do not agree with the popular definition of what art is, namely, that, if blessed or cursed by the gift of longevity, it is a precious historical artifact that requires the context of chronology to have meaning or value, nor do I believe it is a unique object made special by consummate craftsmanship, immediate application as a statement of bold unconventionality or a piece of propaganda devised to reinforce some religious, political or cultural orthodoxy. Instead, I’ve always considered art to be an actual living language forged from the private
contemplation of individuals who are curious about how and why things function as they do – privacy being key to that contemplation for it is within the candor offered by the unflappable internal dialogue that can sometimes exist between heart and head when one is alone where the most honest deliberation over any thought or feeling can occur, chastisement or penalty of violent retribution from priggish or intolerant eavesdroppers never part of the equation. Specifically, art is the most audacious and most precise form of communication available to human beings, a truism that is marred only by straight society’s refusal to recognize it as such for to legitimize the unparalleled frankness of non-lingual forms of expression would be to forever minimize the perceived importance and overall effectiveness of bullshit as a political tool, a religious bludgeon and/or a manipulator of the public will.
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ILLUSTRATION / MR. FISH 21
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I was enhanced by the world whose inarticulate physics were precisely what gave me license to participate in the machinery of my very existence.
Artists know, for example, that there is no perversion or moral failure associated with picking your nose or scratching your ass and will engage in such activity within the private space wherein he or she creates his or her artwork without pause, whereas convention, best exemplified by the public space, will always seize the wrist and insist upon decorum, dutifully paralyzing one’s immediate need to breathe easier or to satisfy an aggravating itch, both literally and metaphorically. After all, wasn’t it Picasso who said, “Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass,” which, while having the desired effect of goosing the complacent stutopia into a moment of genuine alertness, should also be recognized as an important health screening proven to diagnose disease, save lives and, when administered regularly, to promote lifelong habits of self-evaluation and proactive self-maintenance, both literally and metaphorically? The definition of what art is and how I wished to spend my whole life interacting with it is attached to a very specific memory from when I was 14 years old. It was just after dinner on the last day of summer vacation in the Alabama portion of
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Southern Jersey, where the only black people I ever saw were sunburned Italians and the only culture to which I had access was an Encore bookstore that boasted a Robert Mapplethorpe book behind its counter and a miniature golf course that boasted an Eiffel Tower at its 18th hole. This was in 1980, just a few months before the gruesome murder of John Lennon and the even more gruesome election of Ronald Reagan into the White House, neither tragedy I’ve ever completely recovered from, and my mood was rapidly filling with
a dread like wet cement as I looked to the horizon as it filled with storm clouds. With the first day of school sitting like a thug on the other side of sundown, thumping its great club of institutionalized disapproval of all that I ever hoped to become against its very dull palm, I was determined to yank my bike from the loud gewgaws crammed inside the garage for one last ride through the woods to the Ocean Acres Lake. There I planned on stripping down to my underwear and, for one last time before
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MR. FISH 29
I could finally experience the thrill of watching life proceed without the disruptive influence of my presence In my silence I felt not unlike the word fuck and that, in the face of reality’s illiteracy, I was suddenly permitted the grace of getting to exist merely as typeface against pulp, my obscenity made completely irrelevant by the indifference of the corporeal world toward the King’s English. In an instant, I felt as if I could mean so much more by meaning so much less than the bogus definition previously attached to me by the capricious folly of language. Like an emancipated slave allowed to suddenly become invisible inside a free society, I could finally experience the thrill of watching life proceed without the disruptive influence of my presence. By no longer adding my own voice to
the ceaseless blathering that constituted the cacophonous schizophrenia that was the public consciousness, I could finally feel as if I were communing with the wordless truth that lay beyond human comprehension like edifying bones beneath flesh. “Silence is the universal refuge,” Thoreau said, “the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts.” Thus, art for me was about communing with the wordless truth that lay beyond human comprehension, the idea being that listening to music is quite a different thing from sitting in silence and reading sheet music and trusting your literacy to convince you that you should be dancing. ∆
IN FIDEL IX
STREET MUSIC
Text by Camille Charlier Photos by Alexander Kleis & Camille Charlier bookastreetartist.com/de/infidelix
Infidelix is a rapper from Texas who performs on the streets of Berlin. When I first met him around Warschauer, I immediately noticed his optimism and sincere passion for rapping. Born in Houston, Infidelix didn’t exactly plan on traveling across Europe and end up rapping on the streets of Berlin. During his college years, he was more into theater and creative writing: “That’s what got me into stage performing. I slowly started to write rhymes and that’s how my music happened: it just came out as rap”. He then started dedicating more time to rapping and finding shows in his hometown, but didn’t really have
much help and had to book his own tours and find his own ways of recording. He had his first overseas tour a few years later in Ireland where he met many local artists. Infidelix traveled to many other countries before landing in the German capital. He first flew to Spain with an idea in his mind: “I wanted to sell 100,000 copies of my CD. I wasn’t performing at that time, and I was so nervous to talk to people!” This shyness and difficulty in marketing himself was an obvious challenge in the beginning. “I had put myself in a country I didn’t know, with no money, and I had to figure it out”.
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THE PSYCHEDELIC CHEF
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Mayo de Canard Recipe & illustration by JOS*
THE STORY GOES LIKE THIS When you’re a chef, you become an arrogant bastard and you start to think that you can handle a knife like a ninja and that you have the power to say that something tastes like shit (even though it’s normal food and you’re just being a dick) and you tell yourself that you’re about to experience the best food ever. All this makes your life as a simple eater in your hours off work the hardest moments to decide what to eat. That’s when you become a solitary bum sitting on a park bench eating a crappy ham and cheese sandwich and flushing it down with a beer and belching like a beast. I’ll always have that “bum sandwich eater” inside me and that’s why I like to eat alone. I’m the envious kid that doesn’t want to let you use the other Nintendo remote and always wants to be Mario. But then you return to reality and you once again become that kind person who asks, How would you like your sandwich? And I always hope that the answer will be, SURPRISE ME! Fuck yeah! Now that’s my thing, not to be told without mayonnaise or without onions. That’s when I look around me and see sharp knives ready to give the best performance of the day
slicing grapes into halves where the cut is so clean that there isn’t a single splash of evidence. Strawberries that follow the color palette perfectly are the sweet and slightly acidic ingredient that make sense to mix with red onions that with the help of my knife in my right hand are stripped of that dry brownish skin and are ready to be submerged into a bath of melted duck fat or, as my girlfriend says, that CANARD that has been violently stripped from its liver, a vital organ that high society people gloat over slices of expensive bread. And since we’re already working with vital organs, why not tear the heart out, that organ where they say that love is stored, and it may be the touch of magic and bitterness in my potion to seduce the palates of people I don’t know and will never see again, but there is a bit of me on their tongue and digestive tract, the duck and I have now become one. My hands pounding and crushing garlic and peppers that now do splash everywhere and leave evidence of a blow that seeks to tear out all its flavor on the wooden board, showing its wounds and scars that were created by the cuts of different dancing knives. Thanks garlic, you’ve given us the best of you.
INGREDIENTS
PREPARATION
1 duck heart 1 duck liver 100ml white vinegar 2 branches of tarragon 6 purple grapes ¼ red onion 2 garlic cloves 10 white pepper grains 5 strawberries 120g duck skin 300g duck fat Salt
Massage the boiled fat along with the other ingredients, letting heat do its job, removing the shininess from the grapes, the sugar from the strawberries, the aroma from the onion, love from the heart and the other ingredients that shyly add their notes of flavor. In a large pot, melt the duck fat and without breaking the boil, add the crushed garlic and white pepper, grape and strawberry halves and the remaining ingredients. Leave cooking for 45 minutes over very low heat. Once cold, blend everything together until you have the texture of mayonnaise. This is my mayonnaise. It is my gift to you. Get fat, get drunk, have sex!
Magrela
STREET ART
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Text by Maresa Harvey & Guille Lasarte Photography by Alexandra Henry www.streetheroinesfilm.com www.alexandrahenry.com
Giving a voice to the leading ladies of the street art scene
STREET
Since its beginnings, street art has been a maledominated scene, but over the last years, an increasing crop of female artists are asserting their talent around the world. It’s not just about the painting itself. It’s also about your ability to survive in the urban jungle. Fences, walls, ladders, dogs, police – they’re all obstacles that any street artist, regardless of their gender, have to overcome. “You have to become familiar with the nature of working in the street if you want to make it,” says Mexican street artist Fusca. It’s rough, dirty and risky – all adjectives describing an activity more frequently associated to boys rather than girls. So are women underrepresented in the graffiti world? To attempt to answer this question, we have to talk to and get to know the female players of the scene and see what they have to say about it. And that’s where Alexandra Henry comes in.
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On the other side of the coin, many female artists, like Brazilian artist Magrela, don’t see their gender as a barrier and actually prefer not to be recognized by virtue of being a girl. “I don’t want to be known purely for being a woman or for my beauty or for my body. I prefer to be recognized for my art. That’s what’s most important to me.” The subject matter of Magrela’s art raises another theme in Street Heroines, which is the nature of street art itself in different parts of the world. Magrela’s murals often depict sad women that transmit a sense of pain, seemingly arising from their female condition in contemporary Brazilian society. As street art becomes more and more commodified and commercially-friendly in the US, we can see a sharp contrast between the essentially social and political art on the walls of South American cities versus the places, like New York and LA, where the mainstream is gobbling it up. “In South America the street art has a tendency to be more organic and carry a stronger socio-political message than the street
art in the US these days. I think organization of public art at the community level is important, especially in marginalized communities, however when developers and the money men are the organizers who leverage the artists’ work, the message is weakened. The discovery is less impactful. Spontaneity is eliminated. The adventure of urban exploration becomes predictable. I believe that graffiti and street art is a reflection of any given society and being that the US is a capitalistic country it’s almost no surprise that free art left on the streets would be swooped upon by the vultures of corporate America.” Revolutionary street art tends to arise when there are more social and political maladies in a given society, but street artists, like the rest of us, need to pay bills. “I do know that lots of Latin American, and international artists for that matter, set their sights on the US as a place to gain recognition and in turn be commissioned for work. Artists have to survive! The evolution of the movement feels like it is at a crossroads right now, caught between commodification and revolution.”
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Opposite page: Mural by Fusca This page: TooFly Lexi Bella & Danielle Mastrion
Graffiti and street art are a reflection of any given society and being that the US is a capitalistic country it’s almost no surprise that free art left on the streets would be swooped upon by the vultures of corporate America.
TooFly
STREET ART
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eL SEED
art & the community Interview by Mario Rueda Photos courtesy of eL Seed elseed-art.com
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W
ii ie invited the up-and-coming street artist eL gSeed to ihave a small chat with us about his work, its meaning and his latest project in Egypt. Not because he’s up-and-coming, but because eL Seed is one of the street artists of our time who regards his works as community projects with the aim of having a positive impact on society rather than as individual masterpieces that serve merely to fuel his own career. In this sense, the French-Tunisian artist is an authentic artivist who strongly believes that painting on the street democratizes art and that the role of street art is to engage the public in a conversation. He uses Arabic calligraphy in his murals to transmit messages of hope and inspiration and holds that the story behind each work is more significant than the work itself. For his latest piece in Egypt, eL Seed worked alongside his team and the local residents of one of Cairo’s most marginalized and segregated communities. The resulting artwork is bold and beautiful, but its main strength derives from the story behind it. What kind of family environment did you grow up in? I was born and raised in France, in Paris in 1981. My parents are originally from Tunisia, so I feel Tunisian and French at the same time. My father immigrated to France in the late 60s and my mom in late 70s. My father was a worker at a Renault car factory and my mom used to take care of the kids at home. I come from a low income family, but I think that my parents made sure that my siblings and I went to school, got a degree and got a good education. Actually, I have a Master’s degree in Business, Logistics and Supply Chain Management, so I used to be a consultant. I quit my job a few years ago to follow my passion, which is art. I’ve been paining since I was a child. This is what I do the best and I feel useful in a certain way. I’m happy that I followed this path. How did you get involved in arts? I’ve been painting since I was a kid. I was never encouraged to follow art. When you grow up in an Arab community, you’re encouraged to become a doctor, a businessman or a lawyer. I ended up steering away from that path. So far, it hasn’t been easy because you don’t have a stable income. However, it’s very nice to be your own boss.
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How important is the message behind every work? Basically, I’m trying to make sure that every piece I create is relevant to the place that I’m painting at. I don’t want to be a selfish artist and just paint for my pleasure. I really want the piece to belong to the community where I’m painting. I need to make sure that what I’m writing is somehow coming from them. That means that the piece that I would paint in Paris, the US or in South Africa would have to be different from each other. This is very important to me. How important is it for an artist to have a clear story, vision or mission of what they want to accomplish with their art? For me having a clear story and a clear vision is important. I guess that as an artist you have the responsibility to bring people together with your art. I’m trying to bring people together as well as entire communities, cultures and generations. It is our responsibility to create social cohesion. If I don’t know what I’m doing or if I don’t know where I’m going, it’s difficult to convey a message that brings people together and creates social cohesion. It’s important to say though, that most of the time the vision that the artist has of his or her work is not clear from the beginning, it tends to change over time. When you build a project, you might start with an idea that totally transforms into a different idea because of different circumstances. A good example is my most recent project in Cairo. The idea I initially had about the Zaraeeb community and what I wanted to do there changed completely after I visited it.
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Why do you think governments are still very closed to having artists doing more art in public spaces? Even though in the last years there is more support, it’s still very controlled and many times restricted or even prohibited. It depends on the country and obviously every time that you’re going to criticize the government with your art, using public space as a canvas is not allowed. As an artist, I try to avoid authorities and governments. I try to deal with the local communities instead. I’m kind of a “partisan” – like a participative democracy where everybody is part of the process. I believe that artivism is very important. Most of the times I don’t get permission from authorities, I just ask the community where I want to paint.
What do you think about artists that travel the world painting here and there spending a couple of days in each city and not really connecting with the local community? Why is this important to you? For me connecting with the community and having a story to tell after you come back is really important. I think it’s a selfish act to come, paint and then leave. For many street artists, the mission is to go and spread their painting all over the world. To be honest with you, at some point I was kind of on this mission, to have my work in as many places as I could. But then, I started losing the purpose of the whole thing. There is no point for me to go to Egypt and not connect with the people there. There is no point for me to paint in a Favela and
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As an artist, I try to avoid authorities and governments. I try to deal with the local communities instead.
not connect with the local people of Rio de Janeiro. This is also a way to immortalize the piece, because at the end of the day, your painted piece on the street will be destroyed or damaged with time or somebody will simply paint over it. The only thing that will remain is your own experience. That’s why it’s important to me. Why did you self-fund the project in the neighborhood of Manshiyat Nasr (community of Zaraeeb)? The full art project was self-funded because I didn’t want to have to serve any agenda. I didn’t want brands to come and sponsor the project. I think it’s something deeper and sometimes when you have a sponsor, he has to follow a marketing target. I’m trying to avoid that. I’m trying to work as much as I can selling my canvases and sometimes doing commissioned work so I can do my own projects. The only part where I received help is on the movie to be released by the end of 2016, which is produced by the Barjeel Art Foundation – an independent, United Arab Emirates-based initiative established to manage, preserve and exhibit the personal art collection of Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi. Take us through the process of a creating a new project such as the one in Cairo. How do you come up with the initial idea? Actually the first idea came in April 2015. I was sitting at home thinking that I needed a new challenge. I remembered about Manshiyat Nasr and decided to go there. I went there with “humanistic intentions” of beautifying this “dirty place”, but rapidly my understanding of the place totally changed. I realized that those people weren’t living in the garbage but from the garbage and that’s exactly when the artistic intervention or “wall process” started. I knew that I wanted to do an anamorphic piece, so I went there with three members of my team and reached the Saint Simon monastery. A guy working for the church welcomed us and initially thought we were coming to visit the church during the pilgrimage, but I told him that I was an artist and had this crazy idea to paint their neighborhood. I went to the rooftop of the cafeteria and took a picture of the area from above and I thought, now I have to convince each person of this neighborhood, each owner of the houses I want to paint. The church guy told me that I didn’t have to convince everybody, just the priest, father Samaan”. Through a Polish guy called Mario, who has been living in Egypt for around twenty years, we got a meeting with the priest. He was very interested in the idea, but concerned about what I was going to write.
How can street art and its freedom co-exist with the commercial projects that many times follow rules and have limits? It depends on what you mean by commercial project. I know that sometimes you have to take on a commercial project to get income. Sometimes I accept commissioned work, depending on the freedom they give me within them. I think that’s the main aspect when I consider something like that. I don’t want people to put their rules on me. I did a collaboration four years ago with Louis Vuitton and it was great. The only restriction that they gave me was the size of the scope they wanted me to design. They didn’t tell me anything at all. That’s why I accepted. After Louis Vuitton, I got a lot of requests from big brands around the world, but I’m not always interested. I can still consider new collaborations, but the last time was four years ago. Since when and why are you politically-aware of social issues? I think that when you grow up in France with a foreign background, you’re aware from a young age that you’re,
I would say, different in a certain way. People make you feel different. The funny thing is that I started doing calligraphy as a quest for identity. I needed to go back to my roots, so I first learnt Arabic and then I discovered calligraphy and then, later on, I brought it to graffiti. I started to paint graffiti in the late 90s and it was just a hobby. But bringing Arabic into it later on, almost 10 years ago, was for me like a call of trying to find out where I’m coming from, to discover my Arabic origin and ironically the French side of my identity. I was rejecting it for so long when I was a kid and a teenager. The Arabic calligraphy made me claim and totally accept the French part of me. I think the calligraphy and Arabic script and getting into my Arabic roots made me aware of social issues, specifically concerning people like me, a son of immigrants. Later on, you see what’s going on in the world and try to make sure that your work has an impact, that it can have the ability to create social change and can change the mind of one person or a community at large. This is, I think, the point of what I’m doing and I hope I’ll be able to keep doing this. ∆
art & earth Interview by David Tampellini Photos courtesy of Stan Herd www.stanherdarts.com
Artist by passion and the son of a farmer, Stan Herd is a man with a vision. He has been deemed the “Father of Crop Art” for his massive creations that sometimes take up more than 160 acres of land. Herd has been mastering his art over the past 40 somewhat years and his conceptions have no limit. He creates his masterpieces using the fields as his canvas with the use of local crops and modest agriculture techniques. His unique craft, which includes everything from recreations of Van Gogh’s paintings to commissioned advertisements, are best viewed from the air to fully appreciate their beauty. He has created works all over the world and has inspired many to follow in his footsteps – or rather his tractor tracks – and design their own masterpieces throughout the world. Herd is continually inspired to move on to the next big project, yet maintains a humility characteristic of a man who loves what he does.
MUSIC & PERFORMANCE
Music to the Streets Text by Bennet Cerven, Stefanie Tendler & Geordie Little Photos by Stefanie Tendler www.berlinstreetmusic.com
Thousands of tourists pour into Berlin every week to witness the culture of a city heralded as the creative metropolis of Europe. Street music in Berlin is like street art in Berlin – it brings artists, it brings tourists, it brings color – it belongs. Buskers have become as natural and as integral a part of today’s Berlin as galleries in Paris or tourists in Prague. From the professional musician playing for rent, to the young performer seeking a stage to launch a career, the streets of Berlin are filled with a wide array of artists. But it seems to always be on edge, teetering between fully-fledged anarchy and over policed autocracy. Busking in Berlin is possible but not officially allowed, at least not amplified. It’s known to the people who make
the rules but not recognized as an honest profession. A convoluted cycle of regulation and relaxation keeps the community constantly in flux. Nothing ever goes too wrong, but nothing ever seems right either. It remains in a revolving state of equilibrium. So we started Berlin Street Music. We wanted to give street musicians a voice. We wanted to bring people together and create a community. We wanted a flow of ideas and to start a conversation. But most of all, we wanted street music to be recognized as a legitimate activity within the city, rather than a shady pastime that may or may not be allowed depending on the day and the chance of passing or mood of the Ordnungsamt.
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ILLUSTRATION
VIDAM ARTIST STATEMENT bookastreetartist.com/vidam
My artist name “Vidam” is Hungarian and means “happy”. In my images and through my characters, I want to transmit the feeling of happiness in life. Sometimes it happens that the characters in my paintings don’t seem happy. However, just like any other soul on this earth, rest assured that they pursue the state of happiness. I was born in Budapest but raised in Germany. Since 2004, I live and work in Berlin. It was not only my study of design that brought me here, but also the curiosity to live the crazy “big city life” of this culturally rich metropolis. Besides design, I fell in love with electronic dance music at a young age. I couldn’t wait to leave my tiny village of 400 inhabitants behind to immerse myself in the world’s heart of the international techno scene. After finishing high school, I packed my bags, eager to jump into the deep end.
Nowadays, I’m an artist and an illustrator, I run a design company called “Peachbeach” and am one of the members of the happy artist collective “The Weird”. I am interested in a variety of different fields – beyond design and music, I’m into science, philosophy and literature. The diversity of impressions running through my mind make it difficult for me to focus on a certain style. This is the reason why I love to experiment and constantly try new possibilities of expression. I attempt to divide these experiments into periods. During a specific time frame, I focus on one new stylistic device or theme. Originally my images were quite cartoon-like until I tested architectual and more abstract approaches. Now I’m back to painting cartoon characters again. Who knows what will come next? ∆
102 ILLUSTRATION / VIDAM
106 ILLUSTRATION / VIDAM
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