Turned Around

Election season in Berlin means every available vertical surface gets colonized by party posters—red, green, yellow, blue, all of them competing for the same sliver of your attention as you try to get somewhere. The cumulative effect is one of aggressive, low-grade tedium.

The artist collective Einfach so found a response that’s almost elegant in its simplicity: they went out and turned a hundred of them around. CDU, SPD, the lot—flipped so the blank white backing faces the street. Suddenly there were white rectangles all over the city, clean and open, and people started using them.

Their logic is hard to argue with. You could destroy election posters, you could take them down, you could paint over them—but you can also just flip them around. And it’s even legal. The result is a small, dry joke about public space and who gets to claim it, but also a genuinely functional intervention: here is a surface, use it however you want. A little lightness pushed into the day. The name of the group—Einfach so, "just like that," "for no particular reason"—says everything about the register they’re working in. Not a manifesto. Just a gesture.