Article Archive
Unpublished work, along with a backlog of older articles.
Lost in Transition
The club is stuffy from the body heat and sweat, and the techno music blaring from the speakers weaves its way through the crowd, who undulate to the beat. The night started like most others in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv; beers are passed around between friends as the excitement builds for the upcoming DJ set. Anastasia Rygas and her partner Dani Zeidi share expectant glances; it will be a night they will remember forever, but not because of the music or the good vibes. It was the evening of February 23, 2022, and as the next day broke, Ukraine was under attack by Russian forces.
The ongoing war waged by Russia on the people of Ukraine began in February 2014 and escalated with Russia’s launch of a full-scale military attack in February 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin had positioned over 100,000 troops at the Ukrainian border a few weeks prior and, on February 24, 2022, attacked the cities of Berdyansk, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Sumy, and the capital, Kyiv.
“We were out at a club, partying, really fucked up when we heard the war had started,” Anastasia says. “The next day, we were waiting at the Polish border; we were drinking and freaking out about what was going to happen to us next.”
For Anastasia, a 35-year-old Kyiv native, the attacks came as a significant shock to the system; after a night out, she was thrust back into reality by the news that there had been an escalation in Russia’s war against the Ukrainian people. She needed to flee the city with only a few bottles of vodka and snacks in her car. Without the necessary documents to enter the country, Anastasia and Dani waited three days at the Polish border.
“My phone was dead at one point, and I couldn’t contact my family,” Anastasia explains, “I didn’t know how my cats and my mother at home were doing or if they were safe.”
Anastasia finally made it into Poland on February 26, 2022; without a passport, she entered the country based on her refugee status. A week later, she was in Berlin. As of September 2023, over a million Ukrainian refugees of the 2022 Russian attacks have entered Germany.
The Germans' initial response to those fleeing the Russian military campaign was support and sympathy. The war sparked a significant rise in gas and oil prices for Germans and a 1.3% increase in Germany’s population due to the incoming refugees. The strain of the conflict on the country’s resources eventually led to waning civilian support.
“I was overwhelmed by the amount of people and support we felt when we got to Central Station in Berlin,” she says, her voice thick with emotion, “There were so many German people there to welcome us and offer services. People gathered there who were willing to welcome Ukranians into their homes; there were so many that there weren’t enough of us refugees to fill the rooms during the first wave.”
Finally, in Germany, Berlin being the hopeful final destination of their journey, Anastasia and Dani struggled with the bureaucracy and the language barrier. Getting a German telephone number and a bank account and registering with the city were cumbersome and frustrating. Luckily, in May of 2022, they found an apartment with a group of roommates who registered with the NGO Unterkunft Ukraine. Jochen Leimeister, the roommate who sparked the apartment’s desire to help the incoming refugees, assisted them in translating and navigating the system, but it was still a feat.
“It took us months to get a bank account, and you can't get the state-sanctioned support unless you have a bank account,” Anastasia explains. “We were so grateful to have the help from Jochen and the other roommates.”
The first few months in Berlin were an adjustment for Anastasia, her partner, Dani, and the roommates housing them. The traumatizing experience of fleeing her home country on such short notice and the anxiety of not knowing whether friends and family were safe inevitably had a significant impact on Anastasia. Although she was now in a safe space, her life was uprooted, and her future dubious; Anastasia was in a state of panic and uncertainty.
Due to language and age barriers, Jochen and his roommates had to turn down two people before finally being able to help Anastasia and Dani.
“There was an elderly woman and her sister who didn’t speak English or German and needed elevator access to the apartment,” Jochen says, “so we had to tell them that it wouldn’t work out, we didn’t have a lift to our floor. It was incredibly hard to turn down people who were so clearly in need of support.” Jochen runs his hands through his hair, sighing with the weight of the decision even over a year later.
Unterkunft Ukraine contacted Jochen again a few days later, asking whether Anastasia and her partner would be a good fit. After a few WhatsApp exchanges and a brief meet-up, it became clear that this was a good match, and the couple moved into the spacious spare room a day later.
For the Ukranians, the ongoing battle with bureaucracy added to the lingering frustration of their situation. For the Germans, the unexpected coping mechanisms of their new houseguests were also an adjustment.
Jochen explains, “Initially, I was curious about their experiences but recognized the potential trauma surrounding them due to the devastation of their home and families, and didn't want to trigger anything, so I didn't touch the subject. They didn't understand why it was so complicated here and why they couldn't get government assistance for months.”
Anastasia and her partner, Dani, coped with the chaos and uncertainty of their situation by continuing the life they led in the techno scene in Kyiv. Being a major techno hub, Berlin comforted them; the familiar beats and clubs were a proverbial band-aid that temporarily covered their wounds. Jochen and his roommates, while sensitive to the tumultuous situation, were unprepared for the partying that became the couple’s crutch for a few weeks.
“It was going well,” Anastasia says, “until a huge miscommunication occurred with one of the roommates. During a night of drinking, she told us we could stay another two weeks after the originally agreed-upon two months. But I don’t think the rest of the flat knew she had said that.”
When the two months were over and the couple had to leave, they were unprepared and had nowhere to go. They were again in need of somewhere to stay, and given the overflowing hotels and hostels, their future was uncertain. The miscommunication between roommates soured the relationships they had built over the two months, and Anastasia and Dani faced homelessness.
“Jochen felt so terrible about the situation that he offered us money to find somewhere to stay. We were so grateful for the offer and took the money, but we couldn't find anywhere to stay that made sense. The only available hotel rooms were hundreds of euros per night, and we thought we should use the money for food instead.” Anastasia explains, still visibly distraught about how the situation unfolded.
The availability of rooms offered to refugees had dwindled, and the couple found themselves back at Berlin Central Station without anywhere else to go; they slept on the grass outside the station under the large tents set up by volunteers. Luckily, they had acquired their German bank accounts and began receiving assistance from the German government. Anastasia got her registration with the city of Berlin before leaving the apartment, got a job at a vintage shop, and established an inkling of financial stability. The couple bounced around a few more apartments before landing in their current home in Charlottenburg.
Anastasia proudly gives a tour of their new home, saying, “It took us so long to get to this point. Finally, I can’t believe how lucky we are. Jochen came over a few weeks ago, and we reconnected and talked about everything that happened when we stayed with him. Things happen, and there could have been better communication, but we are glad to be in each other's lives.”
Jochen is equally relieved and happy for the couple, expressing, “The strongest memory I have is from when we had to tell them they had to go; the roommate whose room they were in was returning from a trip. The pressure of that decision to then find somewhere again was devastating. The first time I saw them after this, we discussed how they no longer party like they had at the beginning. That phase was not necessarily what they wanted to be doing with their lives, but it was the only way they knew how to cope at the time.”
The couple spent New Year's Eve with Jochen and other friends, enjoying the erupting fireworks on their balcony and the excitement of hosting people in their new home. Under the warm twinkle of their Christmas tree lights, the couple hung pictures of their friends and family and made the apartment their own. After almost two years of tumult, Anastasia and Dani are finally secure and feel in control of their lives and future. And the cherry on top is that Anastasia’s mother is visiting next month and bringing her cat with her.
Swag is Something We All Got
Hip-hop is an elusive genre in a city like Berlin, where techno DJs and events monopolize the clubs and Späti stereos. The countercultural sibling to graffiti, hip-hop’s beginnings are undoubtedly rooted in the fabric of the U.S. and its heavily urbanized and underfunded spaces. Despite the city’s heavy techno influence, a hip-hop open mic night has flourished in a small corner of Berlin for the past 12 years. The Swag Jam, hosted by the six members of the Swag band at Badehaus in the R.A.W. Gelände, has successfully brought together people looking for the undulating beat and referential harmonies of hip-hop, rap, R&B, and afrobeat music.
The Swag opens up the show every Tuesday with improvised jamming and melodic freestyle raps, warming up the audience with some crowd work; when they say, “Swag Jam,” you say, “Yeah, yeah!” Up next is whatever special guest they have arranged; acts vary from female African choir performers and German rappers from Frankfurt to female African-American R&B singers. The one constant is the talent that is showcased on the Badehaus stage. To follow is the open mic portion of the evening, where anyone from the audience can go on stage and showcase their talent. Rappers from Poland, Mexico, and Italy can perform in their native languages, and flutists and saxophone players back up various artists, making us question why there aren’t more brass instruments in hip-hop music. The energy on the humble Badehaus stage is palpable; the Swag love what they are doing, and their enthusiasm is mirrored back by the audience members.
The diversity of the performers and audience members is incredible, with everyone coming together to enjoy music and dancing. Frequent Swag Jam attendee Lotte says, “Every Tuesday when I’m here at Swag, I can just let go of the burdens I carry around all week and lose myself in the music and the passion of the artists.” The event and the space emulate the Berlin spirit of collaboration and community.
The venue Badehaus can be found in the R.A.W. Gelände, or “terrain,” between the southern Berlin neighborhood of Friedrichshain and Warschauer Brücke. R.A.W. has been a pivotal space for the city’s infamous club scene and home to cooperatives, art and graffiti museums, workshops, and cultural initiatives in Berlin for the past 20 years. The site was built in 1867 to be the Royal Prussian Railway Workshop Berlin II, connecting the then-Prussian capital with East Prussia. After the abolition of the monarchy, the name was changed to Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk, which, translated, means the “Government Train Repair Shop” and shortened to R.A.W. The industrial facilities that existed there would be mostly destroyed during a 1944 WWII air raid along with 80% of the area.
The R.A.W. Gelände fell into general disrepair as the city neglected it over the years. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the vast ground along Revaler Strasse found a new lease on life when the local RAW-Tempel association was funded by a group of Friedrichshain art and cultural workers with the expressed purpose of resurrecting the space. What has grown from the wreckage is an eclectic mix of venues plastered from end to end with the city’s famous graffiti tags, bombs, and throw-ups.
The Swag Jam has found its home here and reflects Berlin's collaborative spirit. The band’s frontman, R.A.H., or Rapturous.Apollo.Helios, originally from Nigeria, has lived in the city for over 20 years and stumbled upon the jam session the way most of us did; a friend brought him. It began as a cover jam session. R.A.H.’s friend had asked him to back her up on a track, and the next week, he was invited to be a permanent member of the session.
What began in 2012 has since evolved into Swag Jam. R.A.H. believes its longevity is rooted in the group’s passion for hip-hop: “It's the love for the music itself that we, the musicians and the audience, have. It's the thirst to hear this kind of music. And we improvise a lot, which makes us stand out—there is always something to look forward to.”
R.A.H. explains that, despite being a techno city, Berlin is equipped with enough youth and diversity to comfortably house a hip-hop jam session for over a decade. “You have people who love the music because hip hop is international; it’s a music and an art form for young people. The world is for young people. Young people travel from different parts of the world to come to a city like Berlin, and the Swag Jam fits here. We found our space. That’s another reason we keep doing it: It is important to somehow represent the music we grew up listening to, the music we love.”
R.A.H. and the Swag Jam took that hip-hop representation to another level this past year, traveling around Germany on two separate tours in 2023. Hitting cities such as Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich, the Swag was able to share their love for hip-hop with other German cities and communities.
“We've been playing for so long,” R.A.H. explains, “and we've played shows outside Berlin, but this was the first time we purposely tried to take the whole concept out and see how the reception would be elsewhere. We just wanted to see what would happen.”
The German Federal Cultural Foundation has funds allotted to promote art and culture; a grant allowed the Swag to embark on their first tour. While the group was apprehensive at first about the logistics of a tour, R.A.H. encouraged them not to underestimate the power of what they had been building. The Swag Jam is an event, but the Swag themselves are a band, and they were able to showcase their talent on the road.
“The second time we did it ourselves, we didn't apply for a grant; we just took ourselves out, and every venue was packed at that time. It was a great feeling to know that we had never toured before, and then we went out and did it twice in one year.”
The Swag is actually an acronym, standing for “Something We All Got” or “Seriously We All Great.” It speaks to what the group is about and what the Swag Jam event strives for: its people and a place where music and creative energy can flourish, be shared, and be supported.
“As a testament to what music and art are, regardless of what you stand for, regardless of your religious or political position, once the music comes, once the sound plays, you either feel it or you don't feel it. If you feel it, you are ecstatic about it; you go all out and express yourself best. That’s what the platform is there for; when people come to Swag Jam, they can chill, forget everything out there, and be in the moment.”
One Crew. One Love. 1UP.
Twenty years ago, the members of the graffiti collective 1UP relinquished their individual artistic identities and tags and joined forces under one name. The seed that sprouted in 2003 as a group of four friends in the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg grew to become the 30+ member crew known as One United Power, aka 1UP. The group's ages, genders, and occupations are unknown, but their reign of influence over the city, and the global graffiti game, is notorious. 1UP has spent the last two decades refining the skills needed to complete their significant collective “Actions” that lift graffiti to another level, producing high-energy videos highlighting their work and expanding their worldwide reach.
An Action is a carefully coordinated and planned effort by the 1UP members to get their pieces, in their various forms, completed and highly visible. The Action goes far beyond just the art, painting, spraying, or rolling itself; it's in the execution of the plan and the energy of everyone involved, of one united power. An Action can be as modest as spraying down the side of a building with a fire extinguisher full of paint or as brazen as stopping a U-Bahn train mid-service to do a whole car piece involving 25 people.
For those unfamiliar, a quick sensory queue for their well-known emblem is the Super Mario 1UP mushroom granting you another life. Like in the video game, spotting one of the crew’s pieces adds life to the city as you walk through. The styles, techniques, color schemes, levels of difficulty, and gall of 1UP’s Actions can vary greatly. You can find tiny “1UP” tags and stickers at eye level on the street, see scraggly monochromatic extinguisher writing slightly above your line of sight, and spot the skillfully executed pieces from a distance that tickle the Berlin skyline.
Members of the collective huddle in train stations for hours, waiting to spray the walls for the commuter rush or climb onto unsuspecting rooves to drip paint down the side of buildings. The crew and their photographers suffer casualties; slashed hands while climbing fences and a glass shower while pulling a train emergency brake. They stay up all night hoping to execute an Action before their day jobs start in the morning, the ones that fund their risky hobby. Why and for what?
For the love of graffiti. For the love of art and strategy, for notoriety and thrill, for the messages that need conveying. For the Actions.
1UP considers everything they do as an art form; every step of the Action contributes to the satisfaction of that completed piece. Graffiti is art, but not that kind of art. Not the kind that feeds into the capitalistic reverence of private gallery showings. Graffiti is gritty and of the streets, hard to capture in one word or display in a museum exhibit. While its essence is hard to pin down, it didn’t stop 1UP from collaborating with the recently opened contemporary street art museum Urban Nation in 2017 to bring their art indoors.
The crew had their way of translating art from the streets into an exhibition. The pieces shown were literally pieces of Berlin. In flagrant acts of vandalism, the collective cut out storefront roller shutters they had painted years earlier and carried them to the museum.
“The dialogue between graffiti as street art and graffiti displayed in a museum is something we wanted to portray. Ripping the blinds off the front of businesses with a crowbar is a real act of vandalism, super loud and hard, creating the tensional contrast between the harshness of the streets and fine art,” explain 1UP.
Urban Nation has commissioned over 25 murals around Berlin through their one-wall projects and has worked with 1UP on multiple occasions. On the evening of the “We Broke Night” preopening party, after libations and praise had been flowing for hours, eventually spilling over into one of the Berlin bars, the crew decided to carry out a spontaneous Action. Returning to Urban Nation under cover of dark, members of 1UP convince the security guard to allow them to collect some spray cans; they were the exhibiting artists, after all. They then proceeded to bomb the outside of the museum with a double barrel aerosol assault that was, under the conditions, perhaps not their most elegant work. With the show opening the next day, the smarting crew received a call to return to the museum and spruce up their tipsy tirades. 1UP then performed their magic in open daylight, masked up, to the shock and awe of witnesses and fans alike.
In the bombing, 1UP included a shout-out to Martha Cooper by tagging her name in the piece. The legendary graffiti photographer and co-publisher of the 1984 book Subway Art followed the crew for a week documenting their creative escapades. The perseverance of the then 74-year-old resulted in a 2018 book called, One Week with 1UP, published in cool conjunction with Ninja K. What Cooper was blessed with was inside access to not only the process of painting but the intricacies of the planning and organization for Action's meticulous and tricky to pull off. A rare lens into what makes this graffiti collective so prolific, the images Cooper produced and had to suffer to capture show that the crew operates for more than the love of art, but for the love of a cunning strategy.
The thrill of an Action seamlessly executed is one of the many flames fanning the fire of 1UPs daring members. While in reality, there are regular interruptions to the plan, unsuspected hurdles, and nighttime train conductors lingering longer than is convenient. One Week with 1UP shows the crew crouching in dank subway tunnels, hiding in forest underbrush, waiting for a train to pull up, and ducking for cover behind a small roof ledge. Cooper’s childlike joy, endurance, and willingness to wait for that perfect shot, regardless of the conditions, drew the crew to her in the first place. Her efforts resulted in a behind-the-scenes peek into how much knowledge and organization are needed to pull off the crew’s typical Actions, especially when the mantra echoes bigger, badder, bolder.
“Sometimes graffiti is a thorn in the side of capitalist consumer culture and produces a rupture in the flow of society,” 1UP comments, “Not all the people like that. When we stop a train mid-service, the reality of how tightly wound society is and how it leaves no room or time for two minutes of painting is revealed. Painting on a train shows the constraints of this system. Although, a lot of people don’t see the value in that.”
Invariably 1UP strives to avoid “die, Bullen,” as the German police are known, with the goal of minimal harm or chance of prosecution. While graffiti laws in Germany aren’t as harsh as in many other countries, often just resulting in a cleaning fee and fine, the cost of capture can be high. As a big heterogeneous collective with many different styles of pieces, color schemes, bombing techniques, and levels of difficulty, final decisions typically need to be chimed off on before execution. Each group member brings their own level of expertise and passion to the planning of an Action, be that knowledge of U-Bahn entry points, schedules, camera locations, local connections for roof access, or simply years of experience.
“In the twenty years we have been together, we are constantly learning by doing Actions. Some of us are more interested in trains, some in roofs, and people develop special knowledge, and we share that with the group. Excitement is always part of it; people want in on the action and participate because they enjoy the adrenaline.”
Checkers are integral cogs in the system as they watch out for disgruntled citizens who call the police and city employees who are inclined to do the same. Depending on where in the world 1UP is spraying, the citizens' response, as well as that of law enforcement, ranges from enthusiastic to apprehensive to indignant. While in Cuba and Thessaloniki, the people didn’t care, and the crew was able to paint unabashedly. In the U.S. and Northern Europe, the police care, and sometimes the people do, too, as seen in some of the high-energy YouTube videos 1UP produces.
“As social media emerged, we were able to publish things way faster. Our first video was probably published 10-12 years ago, and it was a longer-form movie; we collected the material for years and spent two years cutting. Now we publish videos on an Action-by-Action basis and have thousands of views overnight. It has certainly affected how we plan things.”
This final piece of the Action, filming and publishing their finished masterpieces, takes time and skill; access to a drone doesn’t hurt either. Some of their most impressive videos use drone footage, and the results are fantastic. One of the most intricately planned ventures by 1UP is the 2018 Graffiti Olympics in Athens. What started as an idea thrown around one night in an Athens taverna by director Selina Miles, who mentioned she had a drone she was learning to use, became the impressive single-shot video of multiple simultaneous Actions in action throughout the city. Filmed during the day, the video features eight pieces done on various rooves, walls, and train cars using fire extinguishers, rollers, and double-barrel assaults. It ends triumphantly with a 1UP roof painting lit on fire like the Olympic flame. The results are spine-tingling.
What the 1UP YouTube videos do is capture the antics and twerking of a group of people who clearly delight in what they are doing and are a part of. In their daring renovation of the Mediterranean Sky, an abandoned shipwreck in the Mediterranean Ocean, crew members pull themselves along a thin rope on an air mattress across the water to bring their supplies aboard. Keep zooming in, and their finished international stamp can be seen on Google Maps. It is an incredibly precise rendition of the 1UP emblem, bright blue and in complete harmony with the clear sky and ocean surrounding it.
The quest for notoriety is a key component in the urge to graffiti, and 1UP has traveled the globe along the way. Just as writers in the 1970s in Queens would strive to be “king of the line,” a desire for recognition and reverence of the work, at least in some part, inspires today’s graffiti artists. At conception, 1UP decided to become one homogenous entity, acting as a united group with power in numbers to increase the chance of getting noticed.
“When we first started tagging, we learned that if you are just pushing your own name, it's harder to get noticed. That is why we decided to join forces, form a crew, discard any personal names, and push the collective name. Our spirit differs from many graffiti crews, where every writer has their own name. In our crew, we really focus on making things together as one united power. That's the spirit of the group.”
As is evident in the palpable glee in pictures or their gripping YouTube videos, the members of 1UP just want to hang out with each other, have fun, and make some cool ass art. As a crew, they can pull off an in-service whole-car aerosol assault in under five minutes. Each person knows their place in the intricate dance, the next move in the performance, where to step, what to spray, and how. But despite how hard it is to pull off some of their Actions, 1UP is about love for each other and adventure - getting recognized for the work is just a perk.
1UP has, at this point, made enough worldwide appearances to have an impact even outside of their hometown of Berlin. While the group was not founded on the basis of any particular political or societal message, they are undeterred from supporting and amplifying causes that resonate with them. Along with the anti-establishment, anti-capitalist connotations that come with street art and graffiti, 1UP has completed Actions in support of the #leavenoonebehind movement and “Smash G8”.
The #leavenoonebehind campaign was founded in Berlin in response to failed actions from the EU member states to protect its citizens and refugees from the spread of Covid-19. The start of the 2020 pandemic made life in refugee camps and life while fleeing even more dangerous, leaving people to fend for themselves. 1UP make their intentions known in the YouTube recordings of their colorful human rights campaign, referencing severely overpopulated camps such as Moria on Lesbos, which housed 20,000 refugees in a space built for 3,000.
“With some of our Actions, we position ourselves clearly against right-wing ideas and fascist tendencies in our societies. Human rights should not be fixed; they should apply universally to all people. We have to stick together now, and it is important that it is shown to other people so that other young people are encouraged to do the same.”
1UP covered train cars, U- and S-Bahn station walls, stairwells, trucks, and rooves with the #leavenoonebehind message. The group has also completed double train car Actions in support of the protests against the G8 summits as far back as 2007. 1UP stops trains mid-service, so the work is guaranteed to run throughout the city and broadcast the message to as many people as possible. The act of graffiti is inherently a statement against the perceived ownership, either by citizens or government, of public property. 1UP uses its years of experience and passion for the medium to amplify the causes and voices of the voiceless and marginalized.
In another act of Artivism and as a commentary about the rapid demise of Earth’s coral reef, 1UP built the world’s first underwater 3D graffiti installation in Nusa Penida. The Action serves as an artificial coral reef to help regenerate corals and marine life.
“Spread the message.” 1UP says, “Take anything – a brush, some chalk, or a fire extinguisher, it doesn't matter, the main thing is that the city becomes colorful, and the slogan can be read everywhere.”
The love of graffiti is tangled up in many heartstrings, be it a passion for people, a thirst for justice, or a longing for adventure. The spraying or painting only lasts a few minutes, adrenaline hits but eventually wanes, and pieces get tagged over, further beauty in impermanence. An Action needs all the united power to organize and complete, from the checkers on guard to the writers laden with cans. The 1UP crew knows by now that seeing it through to the end is not guaranteed.
In those triumphant moments - sweaty, dirty, and donning their face masks of various creeds - 1UP members sit on walls and in the brush, drinking beer and waiting for the morning sun to rise on their latest Action. Graffiti is action; it's the planning and execution, the time spent with friends, it’s the love of creating and sharing it all with the world. It doesn’t matter where you are; Cuba, France, Istanbul, Bucharest, Thailand, Norway, Vienna, Brazil, Chile, Spain, Denmark, or Italy. If you just look up, you might catch a glimmer of 1UP and their joy.