Open Source Graffiti on Torstraße

Street art in Berlin has always lived in the friction between the planned and the accidental—a city that practically invented the aesthetic of the unauthorized wall. Which makes it interesting when someone tries to formalize that process without killing it. In March 2014, three artists with genuinely different visual vocabularies—Wurstbande, Gogoplata, and Rylsee—took over a wall on Torstraße as part of the Sneakers Clash series, a traveling mural project that moved through 16 cities across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa: Amsterdam to Zagreb, Barcelona to Cape Town, Istanbul to Cairo.

What made the Berlin version worth paying attention to was the submission model. Anyone could throw a motif idea at the artists via Twitter or Facebook, and they’d respond—not just with the promise of putting your concept on the wall, but with a rendered interpretation of your idea, handed back to you as a small artwork. The wall as collaborative document, with the artists as editors. That’s a genuinely good idea, even when it’s wrapped in a brand activation, which this was.

I’m usually suspicious of public art that arrives with a corporate logo attached. The sincerity leaks out somewhere in the approval process. But Rylsee’s Swiss-precision geometry, Gogoplata’s looser illustration instincts, and Wurstbande’s particular energy all survived it. The wall ended up looking like art rather than advertising, which is either a testament to the artists or proof that the sponsor was smart enough to stay out of the way. Probably both.