Axel Springer

Who's number is that? Tuesday I received a surprising amount of phone calls on the cellphone that brought over from the US and had unlocked less than a month ago. Very few people know my number as a result, but I was still receiving unrecognized calls.

In part it was due to the craigslist ads that I recently responded to concerning studio spaces for rent in Berlin located on Axel-Springer Str. The first call was from D, one of the members of a design firm, elegant embellishments, that was renting space out of the other half of their 100 sq meter studio. It was originally listed at €150 (perfect!) but I later found out that it was per desk space. Their posting said that they were designing experimental building materials, and I sent them a link to my website. I had to turn them down because I needed at least 2 or 3 desk spaces. I still am kicking myself about it, it would be a great match but it is not in the cards (or the Euros).



I was determined to compensate by being really productive in the studio that afternoon. Then I received another call, while I was riding my bike. This call was from F who got my number from a friend and asked if I wanted some work preparing their gallery for the next show on Friday. F works at Galerie Opdahl, at the end of Axel-Springer Str. Ultimately I said 'yes', eventhough the duties included hanging a digital projector from the ceiling. Many of the other artists that I know in Berlin seem to subsidize their incomes with this type or preparator work. When I arrived they had hired someone else to do the projector installation, which is good because they had concrete ceilings. I was mostly needed to repair the walls and paint over a text work from the previous show. The room was piled with 2x4's and all that was remaining was the shadows of letters that had been projected through a large scale structure that had been formed from all of the wood leaning on one another, spanning the gallery. I started yesterday and finished the job today, feeling a bit more integrated as an on-call contractor in Berlin.

Oddly enough these two spaces are located within a block of each other. They are in a part of the city center called Spittelmarkt, which I had never even stepped foot in prior to this week. It is an incredibly eerie part of the city that is half empty and half filled with new high-rise residential and commercial spaces and the Bundesdrukerei (federal mint). There are huge overgrown empty lots in this part of town from where the Berlin Wall previously divided this area and there is a clear line of urban wasteland that still remains. It is one of the few parts of the city that still evokes the void that bounded the Wall. It is now being overrun by nature, called the inner-city prairie by slab-mag, and is also the site of an sculpture park intervention soon to be incorporated into the Berlin Biennial.


Empty lots left-over from the path of the Berlin Wall