A couple of weeks ago Mar­tin invited us on one of his new tours. On his beau­ti­ful bikes (whenever we get the chance, we leave our own bikes at home and bor­row one of his’ — they’re just too pre­cious), Mar­tin guided us through Kreuzberg and Friedrich­shain on his newly added “Street Art Tour”. Truth be told: most of us had pretty much seen all of the things he presen­ted us. We’ve all been liv­ing here for quite a while, so the pro­spect­ive of the tour was not to see any­thing new (which we did though — couple of new things, in fact).

Instead, Mar­tin went out of his way to show us very spe­cial art­works and put them into his­tor­ical and local con­text. We found out things about pieces that have been there forever, we dis­covered new works by fam­ous artists, we dis­cussed the com­mer­cial­isa­tion of street art in Ber­lin and best of all, we had a pretty good time (even though I almost blinded myself when a bal­loon popped into my eye; also I hit off the edge off my tooth when I tried to drink from a bottle. But still, good times!). If you’re inter­ested in book­ing a tour with Find­ing­Ber­lin Tours or if you just want to rent one of the won­der­ful, hand-built Singlespeed Bikes, go over and con­tact Mar­tin for more information.

There was this one thing I learned on the tour that I want to illu­min­ate here. Everytime I pass the Kais­ers Super­mar­ket on Wran­gel­straße I smirk to myself about the “This is not Kreuzberg” tag on the build­ing wall. I always guessed that someone was pissed with rising rent prices and gentri­fic­a­tion issues, in gen­eral the change of the Kiez, espe­cially Wran­gel­straße. But Mar­tin told us the other side of the story: this is a play on a line that had been on exactly this wall before, com­ment­ing on the big chain super­mar­ket Kais­ers within the Kiez with “This is not Amer­ica”, as in “this is not cor­por­ate Amer­ica”. I fished an earlier pic­ture out of Flickr so you can com­pare it. Pretty neat insight.

2007

“This is Not Amer­ica” 2007

2011

“This is Not Kreuzberg” 2011

But enough of that — here are the rest of the pic­tures of our tour. We can only recom­mend dis­cov­er­ing the city this way, even if you’ve been here for a while. Don’t miss out on what this city has to offer, it’s great, it’s diverse and it’s so much fun. Thanks Mar­tin for a great day!

A new Brad Downey piece at Oberbaumbrücke

Street Art sponsored by Levis at RAW Temple. Is it still art?