The German embassy opened its yard to the public on Feb. 15 to showcase work from some of Canada’s and Germany’s top graffiti artists as they painted a huge mural in commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago.
Two German graffiti artists, known by their tags Poet and Arunski, along with Canadian artists Zek and Striker, were invited to paint a mural for eight hours before a public gathering, complete with German hip-hop music, mulled wine and sausages. Only steps from the Rideau Canal on Waverley Street, they hoped to draw many visitors from other nearby Winterlude events.
“Our team is to go with the German flag colours — red, yellow, and black,” Zek, a Montreal-based graffiti artist, said ahead of the event. “We’re painting characters and symbols that relate to German culture — eagles and lions and so on.”
The event developed as a strange marriage of various groups that embassy spokesperson Martin Schurig says were not immediately foreseen when the project began.
“I didn’t know that the top company for spray paint is German, and so we when asked for help, they quickly came up with the idea to bring two artists from Berlin,” says Schurig.
The two German artists painted their own graffiti on the Berlin Wall in the 1980s, back when the wall and the Cold War still divided the city in two. Embassy officials then reached out to find an airline to sponsor the transatlantic flights, and soon they had found a way to bring German artistic style to the Canadian event.
“German style looks very American, but with European influences,” says Zek. “It’s more American than French.”
While French and other European graffiti are described as having a basis in traditional drawing styles, American-style graffiti focuses more on fonts and letterings, although the line between the two can be very blurry.
“The wall in Berlin was covered in graffiti,” says Schurig. “(The artwork) reminds us of Berlin.”
Over time, graffiti has become one of the most enduring symbols of the Berlin Wall since its collapse. Most of the remaining pieces of the wall still standing are now totally covered in graffiti murals.
“Graffiti is always about taking a public space and personalizing it with your own name,” says Lorrie Blair, an art professor at Concordia University who specializes in graffiti as a social phenomenon. “A new wall is a canvas now… it has to be seen as art.”
Schurig said the embassy wanted the event to reflect the feeling of belonging that many Germans felt as their country began to unify.
“We’ve invited the whole neighbourhood,” says Schurig. “For us, it’s the perfect match to combine the fall of the wall with the openness of Winterlude.”
The completed mural will be put on exhibition this November at the Diefenbunker in Carp, at the official celebration of the wall’s dismantling, which occurred throughout early November 1989. The Diefenbunker is Canada’s museum of the Cold War and once contained a bomb-proof lodging for members of Parliament and also a vault where the Bank of Canada once stored their gold stockpile. Schurig says that Poet and Arunski will be flown back to Ottawa for the exhibition, which is taking place in the vault, and also give a workshop on graffiti art in Europe and North America.