In the last years Dresden became some­thing like my retreat from the big city. Whenever I need to calm down from the heavy bom­barde­ment of input in Ber­lin I go to there and chill out for while. This cer­tainly has some­thing to do with my two friends, the art duo Sut­ter & Schramm. They live in the neigh­bor­hood of Neustadt which is the only altern­at­ive neigh­bor­hood in Dresden. From a Ber­linian point of view it’s a very small Friedrich­shain, just some streets and not very men­tion­able shops and bars.

But this is not what I’m look­ing for over there. I don’t want it to be a second, third or whatever Kreuzberg. I want it to have an incred­ible East Ger­man flair, some­what vil­lage like — with small green back­yards and hid­den keys to the apart­ment. I want to lie there in the sun, read books, be bored and at the same time excited by the artsy power of my friends and their col­leagues at the amaz­ing Kunsthochschule.

Together with Nico, Soraya and Stefan we decided to take on a trip last week­end. It turned out to be as calm­ing and relax­ing as I had expec­ted, and some won­der­ful pic­tures were pro­duced that we would love to share with you.

In addi­tion to the pic­tures I would also like to post a video I shot of my friends back­yard two sum­mers ago. It cap­tures the feel­ing that I had just tried to describe: relax­ing, unmo­tiv­ated, simply calm and without any driv­ing momentum that some­times bursts your head with stress.