We went directly through the epicenter of the district fondly known by its area code 36 also known as Kreuzberg. To see some of the well known street art of this city we hopped down Oranienstrasse and Skalitzer Strasse all the way to the Oberbaumstrasse bridge. Along the way we got a chance to discuss the difference between tags of various mediums, commissioned works, and the way gentrification and a constantly shifting subculture of artists are changing and obfuscating the scene today. Here is a passage from Benjamin’s A Berlin Chronicle to help guide you along some of these images of the work we saw.

“Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the menu=I’m in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own Burris past must conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tome and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter its self is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand – like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery – in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.” Pp 25-26