Marina Capdevila has completed a new mural titled “Compartiendo Muros”, painted at Colegio Público Nuestra Señora de la Concepción in Madrid. The project is part of the Madrid City Council’s Sharing Walls program, which brings artists into public spaces across the city. The project also includes workshops and conversations with students at the school.
“Compartiendo Muros” features Capdevila’s recurring cast of older women in playful, contemporary scenes — here on skateboards, surrounded by plants, and outfitted with everyday tech.
Marina Capdevila. Compartiendo Muros Project. Madrid, 2025. (photo courtesy of the artist)
As her style continues to evolve, Capdevila refines her language of joy, exaggeration, and everyday rebellion — especially when her subjects are the elders who are often cropped out of the picture. Long-time observers will note that a direction that feels more textured and improvisational, without losing the clean graphic pounce/punch she’s known for.
Marina Capdevila. Detail. Compartiendo Muros Project. Madrid, 2025. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Hard-edged shapes bump against charcoal-like marks and quick gestures, as if she’s inviting us into the creative process rather than polishing it too much. Her stylish grandmothers sprawl across the wall with irrepressible swagger; eyes dart from sunglasses to oranges, plants, dogs and daisies — a mural in motion with soft spray volumes and playful scribbles. Cute or coarse? Obviously both. With her tightening of this hybrid technique, spatially stacked for impact, it’s a notable step forward.
Capdevila’s ongoing ode to aging with sun-ripened color and individual flair lands as pure confidence. The artist’s own personal style runs right alongside it — a spirit of joy, and a reminder of our lifelong superpowers.
Marina Capdevila. Detail. Compartiendo Muros Project. Madrid, 2025. (photo courtesy of the artist)Marina Capdevila. Compartiendo Muros Project. Madrid, 2025. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Born outside Sydney and based in Glasgow, Sam Bates—SMUG—began the way many graffiti writers do: skateboards, hip-hop, and late-night missions to get his name up.
That early graffiti period sharpened his sense of scale and texture. Over time, his work stretched beyond letters toward faces and figures—painting freehand—evolving into what some have called a stylized realism. We might say it is stylized realism with a twist, because the people SMUG paints are recognizably themselves and yet just a half-step into a dream—close enough to touch, strange enough to study. His characters, whether a tired worker, a mischievous child, or a curious bird, are rooted in real life and heightened just enough to suggest a larger story and possibly a punchline you hadn’t anticipated.
SMUG’s walls can now be found in cities across Europe and Australia—from the Glasgow City Centre Mural Trail to festival sites in Edinburgh, Melbourne, Kotka, and North Hobart, as well as the rural stretches where grain silos tower like cliffs above their towns. Silos have become something of a specialty, especially in Australia, and his work has joined a growing effort to treat these industrial structures as community landmarks rather than leftovers waiting to decay. Juddy Roller, the Melbourne-based creative studio behind the Silo Art Trail, has been central in connecting SMUG and other artists with local communities and producers, including the new mural here in Kapunda.
Kapunda’s silos stand at the edge of one of Australia’s earliest copper mining settlements, and the story told through paint reflects that history—an 1840s miner at work underground, a scene lit with grit, not nostalgia. It’s a reminder of the physical cost that built the town and, by extension, the country. This miner is not a romantic emblem; he is a working figure whose story has largely gone unpictured. Scale and proximity do the rest: a giant face meets the viewer head-on, turning past industry into a present encounter.
As history often does, it becomes a conversation about now. Many here in Kapunda say the town is changing—creatively, economically—and the silo artwork is one of the most visible signs of that shift. The project grew from a community campaign, and the result feels local in the best way: a monument to people. In SMUG’s hands, realism serves memory and identity—and, as you know, a wall (or a silo) can tell a fuller story than a plaque ever could.
If this is stylized realism with a twist, the twist may be perspective: look up, look closer, and see what a town chooses to show the world on a canvas impossible to ignore.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. Photographer Jaime Rojo hit the ground running upon getting back to dirty old Brooklyn this week from a Berlin/Prague tour. Lots to report from there on the walls, in the gallery, and in the museum spaces – and more to come for you to enjoy. In the meantime, here’s what he found on the streets of NYC; a mash-up of handstyles, graphics, pop cues, fine-art chops, humor, sarcasm, reverence, and straight-up rebellion — cultures colliding and talking back.
We begin the show with a new portrait of the much-loved graffiti and street art photographer Martha Cooper, based on a photo by Corey Nickols and painted by Swed Oner (Mathieu Taupenas) in Bushwick with Joe Ficalora and the Bushwick Collective by his side. Born in the south of France in the 80s, a graffiti writer in the late 90s, Swed Oner is now known for his hyper-realistic, monochrome portraits of people transformed into religious icons – featuring a “halo” motif for framing.
Featuring Dzel, EAZV, EXR, Gloom, Homesick, IMK, ISB, Jodi Da Real, KAMZ, Mike King, Notice, RIP Money, Shwan McArt, Silent, Smaer, Two Five, VENG, Warios, Werds, and ZOZS.
For more than two decades, MrKas has carried his Porto-born graffiti instincts across continents, painting walls from Ireland to Malta, Greece, the Netherlands, the Azores, and beyond. Festivals such as Waterford Walls, Meeting of Styles in Tampere, Kings Spray in Amsterdam, and the Pompeii Street Art Festival have shaped his evolution, each one adding another chapter to his ongoing dialogue between realism, memory, and perception. Yet no matter how far he travels, there is a steady pull that brings him back to Portugal. The return is not nostalgic but purposeful—a way to ground his practice in the places that shaped his earliest sense of community and identity.
MrKas. Generations. Riodades, Portugal. (photo courtesy of the artist)
What began as youthful graffiti—an impulsive act sparked by a stray spray can on a Porto street—has matured into a visual language built on precision, layered imagery, and portraits that seem to exist between dimensions. Today, he combines the discipline of photorealism with deliberate ruptures: cut-outs, geometric interference, and the feeling that an image is being assembled or disassembled in real time. The tension is central to his work.
MrKas. Generations. Riodades, Portugal. (photo courtesy of the artist)
His newest mural, Generations, created for the Douro Street Art Festival in the village of Riodades, carries some of those ideas into a deeply local context. Painted on the walls of the town’s school, the work reflects the artist’s engagement with the region’s everyday life. “In Riodades, among the vineyards and mountains of the Douro Valley, I found a story of identity and belonging,” he says.
MrKas. Generations. Riodades, Portugal. (photo courtesy of the artist)
The mural depicts three figures—“three souls,” in his words—each one connected to a facet of the village’s character: childhood and learning, music and harmony, tradition and joy. In the section showing the musician’s hands playing an instrument, the composition tilts between realism and constructed image, pointing directly to the layered, intergenerational act of keeping culture alive.
This appears as a recognition of the people who define the Douro’s cultural continuity. “This mural is more than paint. It’s a tribute to the people who keep culture alive. Here, the future begins with roots—strong, real, and human,” MrKas tells us.
MrKas. Generations. Riodades, Portugal. (photo courtesy of the artist)MrKas. Generations. Riodades, Portugal. (photo courtesy of the artist)
For one week this fall, BlankMagBooks in New York quietly hosted photographs by Sonny Gall from her new publication 99 of NY, released by King Koala Press with text by Mila Tenaglia. The exhibition was small but telling — a passing moment in the life of a project that had already taken a decade to form.
Described by the publisher as “a compositional and documentary endeavor that unfolded naturally over the course of a decade,” 99 of NY gathers 99 photographs across 110 pages, printed in both color and black and white, in a durable hardcover, album-sized format. True to King Koala’s limited-edition tradition, it’s a finely produced object — modest in scale and rich in substance — that rewards slow looking and quiet reading.
Gall’s images vibrate and render when leaning toward the overlooked: empty lots in Queens, warehouse walls, families at home, scattered pigeons, playgrounds under scaffolding. They are fragments of a living city seen with patience and affection, moments that feel at once offhand and deliberate. Tenaglia’s accompanying texts deepen those impressions without overexplaining, their language as sharp and unadorned as the photographs themselves, yet evocative of the unseen – with a poetic wandering appropriate for the attitude of discovery. Together they capture what it means to move through New York — not as spectacle, but as encounter.
Gall, born in Milan and long settled in New York, brings a deep familiarity with the city’s hip-hop and graffiti circles and a sensitivity to its architecture and light. Tenaglia, from Rome by way of Pescara, came to New York through journalism and documentary film, drawn to stories that find beauty in imperfection. Their partnership is grounded in trust, a love for street culture, and shared intuition: one sees, the other shapes the narrative.
99 of NY feels like the city it portrays — restless, imperfect, alive. The brief gallery presentation served as an echo of the book’s essence, but it’s the pages themselves that hold the weight: a decade or more of lived experience distilled into images and words that ask to be read slowly, with attention and care.
We spoke with Gall and Tenaglia about their work:
Brooklyn Street Art:When did you first begin to see yourself as a photographer, rather than simply someone taking pictures?
Sonny Gall: Honestly, I still see myself simply as someone who takes photos to satisfy a personal instinct and sense of pleasure. It was friends, acquaintances, and even people I didn’t know—my Instagram followers—who started calling me a photographer and encouraged me to pursue this project more seriously.
BSA:What do you feel you’re capturing in your photographs of New York — is it its people, geometry, pulse, or something more elusive?
Sonny Gall: What draws me in are all the things often associated with graffiti and street art—the play of colors, architectural contrasts, the diversity of people, and those small details that catch my eye on an aesthetic level. I tend to visualize compositions that I enjoy framing and coming back to later.
BSA:How do graffiti and street culture weave into the moments you frame — are they a backdrop, a rhythm, or a conversation within your images?
Sonny Gall: Graffiti and street art are what primarily capture my attention. I love framing them within the urban context of the city. They’ve become a defining element of my work, giving my photos rhythm, identity, and a distinctive character.
BSA:When did this project first take shape for you, and in what ways has your vision of the city evolved since then?
Sonny Gall:99 of NY was conceived in 2013 but stayed on hold for several years. Life happened, but the idea never left me. With the encouragement of friends and family, I realized I needed someone to help bring it to life. That’s when I reached out to my friend Mila Tenaglia, in 2021, during Covid. We had both moved from Italy to New York around the same time, sharing similar experiences and a deep love for the city. I immediately knew she would be the perfect partner—our visions aligned naturally. With her structured writing and my photography, we created something beyond a book: a visual and emotional portrait of a transforming New York—our New York—rapidly reshaped by gentrification.
BSA: If someone could not see these images, what would you want them to understand about them through your words?
Mila Tenaglia: I’d want the writing to pull readers straight into that chaotic, creative spiral that is New York — a city of bombed-out corners, tags, graffiti, and gestures that still breathe in the semi-illegality of pure expression. Every mark on a wall is an act of self-definition: it demands nothing, yet it insists on being seen. I hope that pulse — the urgency, the defiance, the raw emotion — can be felt even without the images, carried only by the words.
BSA: The city is chaotic and unpredictable — how do you capture its essence in language?
Mila Tenaglia: That’s a beautiful question — one I ask myself all the time. My life and my work, built around culture, people, and documentary storytelling, keep me on the streets every day. I live and work within the pulse of the city. After so many years here — in a place I can finally call home — I think I’ve absorbed something of its rhythm. Like a painter with a brush, I’ve tried to translate that rhythm into language, to turn what I see and live into words that still breathe New York’s restlessness.
99 of NY by Sonny Gall. Written by Mila Tenaglia. King Koala Press. Italy 2025
BSA: Whose words or voices have most inspired your own?
Mila Tenaglia: I’ve always been drawn to voices that carry both fire and fragility — writers who turn experience into resistance. Oriana Fallaci, with her fearless confrontation of power, taught me that truth has a pulse and a price. Patti Smith showed me how poetry can be lived — raw, unfiltered, born from the noise of the streets. Joan Didion taught me the precision of silence, how restraint can be as powerful as rebellion. And Rebecca Solnit, with her wandering intellect, reminds me that thinking and walking are the same act — a way of mapping the world through attention. Together, they form a kind of compass: their words move through chaos with grace, and that’s what I try to do too — to find beauty without erasing the struggle. There are many other names I could mention, but right now I feel like highlighting these voices in particular.
Aerosol, Avignon, astronauts, and an ornery ornithologist under the U-Bahn feeding hundreds of pigeons, making threats toward a visiting photojournalist about revealing her identity — it’s all part of a typical sunny fall survey of Berlin as we track the streets under the U3 from Urban Spree to Urban Nation on foot. It’s a hike, but why not? You’ve got to burn off last night’s Schultheiss beers that add to your girth and your bleary, sun-streaked view of the streets. Keep your eyes darting across surfaces and you’re rewarded in this city: stickers, tags, stencils of owls and cats, and Haring and Frida, impossible Berlin Kidz pieces sliding down walls from high altitudes, and 1UP tags in nearly every possible — and impossible — location.
Closer to Nollendorfplatz station, the formal murals from UN mix with a kaleidoscope of local spray — a lively conversation about fame, the environment, politics, gentrification, fear, love, and the many Paradoxes of life (see what we did there?).. Alive and kicking, shall we say, in Berlin. Next stop; Prague.
This week’s interview with the streets includes: 1Up Crew, Berlin Kidz, Cartonneros, Dylan Mitro, Erka, Kranz, Media’s, Paradox, Phoebe Graphy, Push X, The London Police, Unplatonic, and Victor Ash.
Canadian artist Dylan Mitro collaborated with residents of the so-called “Omabunker”—a senior apartment building near URBAN NATION in Berlin—to create the community wall project “Love Letter from the Omabunker.” During his Martha Cooper Fellowship, Mitro invited the folks who live there to photograph one another and their surroundings, turning everyday snapshots into large black-and-white portraits now covering the building’s façade.
The project reflects Martha Cooper’s documentary spirit—finding beauty and dignity in ordinary lives—while reworking it into a collective, site-specific gesture. Here, the street becomes both subject and canvas: the photographers and the photographed are the same people, turning their home into an image of itself and making visible a community that often may be unseen.
This year Graffitea 2025marked its tenth anniversary in the small Valencian town of Cheste, about 30 kilometers west of Valencia, with a new edition that reaffirmed its role as one of Spain’s most significant public art projects. Over the course of a decade, the festival has transformed this municipality, with more than 160 murals now lining its streets. The project, featuring new works by artists from Spain and around the world, is promoted by the Department of Culture of the City Council of Cheste. In communication with the community, Graffitea is both a municipal initiative and a collaborative cultural endeavor, officially sustained by a belief that mural art enriches public space and social consciousness alike.
Under the artistic direction of Toni Espinar, who also oversees its on-the-ground organization, Graffitea aims to balance curatorial vision with community participation. The festival was originally initiated in 2016 by Mª Ángeles Llorente, councillor for culture at the time, what began as a small-town experiment in civic art has become a national reference point for how local governments can embrace urban creativity as a driver of education, tourism, and pride..
The 2025 edition of Graffitea is distinguished by an eco-feminist theme, featuring 13 women muralists including Btoy, Fio Silva, Roseta FS, Anna Repullo, Hera Herakut, Margot Margay, Maríadie, Raquel Coba, Ana Corazón, Hélène Planquelle, Daniela Guerreiro, Lluïsa Penella i Pons, and Alicia Jordá de Lucas. Their walls touch on themes of care, love, memory, and respect for nature. Alongside these, projects like Graffitea con Palestina — co-organized with UNRWA — underscore the festival’s international outlook and solidarity with human rights causes. Such collaborations expand the festival’s social scope beyond visual spectacle, anchoring it in sometimes difficult conversations about themes such as gender, ecology, war, and justice.
According to the Comunitat Valenciana’s official tourism portal, Graffitea’s annual program includes conferences, round tables, screenings, practical workshops, and guided routes — a format that seeks to connect artists with audiences. Over the years, related events have also included concerts, hip-hop performances, and mural scholarships, weaving together art, education, and local participation. After a decade and 160 murals, Graffitea flexes the power of contemporary urban art and the enduring capacity of communities to welcome artists as partners in shaping the public imagination.
Our thanks to photographer Louis Olive Bulbenna for sharing these recent photos that he took with BSA readers.
Street art functions best when it is a witness, not only a declaration. “I was here, I am here” is the simplified version, and often there are clues that tell you so much more.
In the case of New York’s Appleton, that voice speaks of more than presence: it traces a life lived, marked by survival, activism, and visual urgency.
This week he returns to Chelsea with his new solo exhibition—A New Hero Emerges—to be held at Sims Contemporary, 509 W 23rd St (10th Ave), New York City, opening Thursday, November 6, 2025.
Appleton (image courtesy of the artist)
Artist, activist & speaker, he’s been developing a compelling body of work on the street over the last decade or so – with the goal of raising awareness of type 1 diabetes, which he is directly affected by. With street art, painting, photography, and sculpture, his lived experience becomes the substrate of his art: the insulin vials, the syringes, the shoes of children, the climb of street-wheatpastes from New York’s High Line to alleyways abroad.
In the new show, his metaphorical reach expands. A New Hero Emerges draws on the iconography of the Tin Man from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—that winning figure of armor, of missing heart, of longing—as a symbol of perseverance, courage, and compassion. Although we know that Oz didn’t give anything to the Tin Man that he didn’t already have – in this example, a heart. Appleton’s motto may well be: “Oil to the Tin Man is insulin to the diabetic.” It’s street-art poetics meeting personal reality.
Over the years, Appleton has taken his message across U.S. cities and continents: gallery shows from New York to Los Angeles, Miami to San Francisco; street-walls from Busan to Barcelona, London to Lisbon, Bangkok to Berlin. His past solo exhibitions include Out of the Cold (NYC, 2016), Too Young for Type One (LA, 2017), and Too Young for Type One II (NYC, 2019). His role extends beyond the wall: he is Artist-in-Residence and speaker with $dedoc #dedocvoices, sharing in major diabetes-/health-conferences (e.g., Madrid #EASD60, Lisbon #ISPAD50, Bangkok #ADA85th).
As part of the street-art community, he uses the anonymity of the city to amplify a deeply personal voice. The “tag” Appleton is, in fact, his grandmother’s maiden name and his middle name—an intentional reclaiming of identity.
Approaching the opening of A New Hero Emerges, we spoke with Appleton thinking about his practice, empathy of strangers, survival in the city, street art presence and gallery fame.
Brooklyn Street Art: What is the message you are sending out to the world?
Appleton: That we are all one. That we are all in this together. In this daily struggle & hope for a cure.
Diabetes can really be… Forgive me, a fucking nightmare that a lot of people hide the difficulties even from their closest friends.
BSA: What is the response, if any, you’d like to receive from the public?
Appleton: A wide range of responses people describe my work as inspiring, thought-provoking, and moving.
Others are disturbing, even cynical.
I went into a coma at six years old and almost died.
An older sister died before I was born of unrecognized diabetes.
In one of my Street pieces, it says Diabetes coming to a child near you and someone wrote over a day later, “a child sees this.”
I cleaned it up and wrote back I hope so I knew what Diabetes was at when I was six so should every six year old talk to eat better and be aware of conditions that they might not recognize.
I went into a coma from unrecognized diabetes, and it still happens today.
Diabetes masquerading as the common cold as something else, and even in today’s age, doctors still miss it.
That’s pretty much my mission in a nutshell as an artist and a person with decades of lived diabetic experience.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week, LIVE from New York! Gorgeous weather for the NYC Marathon today, where more than 50,000 runners will go through all five boroughs. Still that doesn’t beat the number of costumed freaks, monsters, fairies and K-Pop Demon Hunters at the Village Halloween Parade, where over 80,000 costumed participants (and around 2 million spectators) flooded the streets Friday Night.
On the street and on the subway, in corporate and boutique offices, in the library, and in the frozen food aisle of your grocery store, Friday was full of children and adults in costumes prancing and preening, looking for goodies, posing for pictures, and battling the autumn winds that feel like they could lift and carry some small children and dogs that were not tied down. Shout out to the hot babe in fangs and clever cleavage leaning out the window of her Escalade at the stop light on Delancy Street yesterday afternoon. Despite all of these jubilant and tempestuous personalities parading across the city, there is only one Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, the New York punk rock band that gave a free concert at Tomkins Square Park leading up to Halloween.
In other number news, reinforcing the growing disconnect between festivity and hardship across the city, nearly 3 million New Yorkers receive food aid from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the federal government shutdown is cutting off their food, as of yesterday. The New York State Governor Kathy Hochul declared a food state of emergency. It makes us all wonder who the true monsters are.
Speaking of politics, roughly 370,000 New Yorkers have already cast early ballots in this new mayoral race. As the country leadership leans hard right, it looks like New York City is going left, like the Netherlands did this week.
For a few more days this week, BlankMagBooks (17 Eldridge Street, Chinatown) — run and curated by Jun Ohki — is featuring photos by Sonny Gall from her newly launched book 99 of New York, with texts by Mila Tenaglia. The streetwise romance of this photographer’s eye draws the viewer into often overlooked streets and scenes of New York with acute observation, adoration, and a sense of possibility. With texts that contextualize and accentuate the images throughout the slim and ample hardcover, the reader comes to see everyday scenes anew. If you’ve spent any time amid the post-industrial rubble of Brooklyn and Queens—graffiti, clouds, pigeons, basketball courts, and construction cranes—you’ll recognize that Gall has captured them precisely as they are lived.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring AKUD, BornOner, ENT, EXR, Frodrik, Humble, Never Satisfied, OPE TFP, One Mizer, SOULS, Tess, VENA, Vers 718, Zero Productivity, and Zooter.
Berlin has always been a city that remembers through reinvention—a fitting place for the first recipient of a photography scholarship named in honor of a pioneering ethnographer whose seventy-year career preserved worlds in flux. The recipient of the first Martha Cooper Scholarship for Photography, the Canadian photographer and researcher Dylan Mitro, has spent recent months in the city exploring its queer memory through Inherited Thread, a project that draws together archival study, re-photography, and contemporary documentation. Their work, soon to be exhibited in Berlin, revisits Schöneberg’s queer nightlife ecology from the 1980s onward, asking how we inherit histories that were often hidden, erased, or displaced—and how we might keep them alive through art and documentation.
Inherited Thread takes as its starting point Berlin von Hinten, a gay tourism atlas first published in 1981 that catalogued Berlin’s bars, bookstores, and venues at a time when queer life existed largely in coded networks. From this modest guidebook, Dylan reconstructs a cultural topography: visiting surviving sites, mapping closed ones, and photographing their present forms. Their fieldwork extends into the archives of the Schwules Museum and Spinnboden, where they piece together ephemera—ads, zines, snapshots, and personal notes—that once charted a thriving but precarious social world. Each recovered address becomes a point of dialogue between past and present, what was lived, and what remains.
Materially, the project echoes themes of loss and persistence. Cyanotype quilts made from archival interiors fade from clarity to a certain ghostliness; resin-encased photos hold light like memory suspended, and weatherproof plaques marking the sites of vanished community. These gestures of preservation aren’t presented as nostalgia; they propose to keep history embodied and visible. Mitros’s own approach to documentation asserts that the everyday places where people gathered, danced, and organized are as vital to collective memory as any monument.
As Dylan prepares for their Berlin exhibition in November, Inherited Thread unfolds as a living, site-specific memory atlas of queer life—stitched from archival guides, re-photographed spaces, and the testimony of those who remember. It reflects a city still negotiating its relationship to memory, visibility, and belonging. And like the scholarship’s namesake, whose life’s work has championed careful observation, human imagination, and dignity, Dylan’s practice reminds us that documentation, when done with empathy and rigor, is itself an act of care.
“Inherited Thread attempts to better understand our Queer histories through archival ephemera. Dylan has conducted research in the LGBTQIA+ archives of the Schwules Museum. Focussed on the historic publication Berlin Von Hinten, a Gay tourism atlas first published in 1981, showcasing nightlife and community spaces that defined Berlin in the 1980s and 1990s. Revisiting and mapping forgotten landscapes through printmaking and photography, this project seeks to explore the inheritance of historical LGBTQIA+ spaces, and how to keep their stories alive.”
Following is our interview with the artist, researcher, and photographer.
I. Artistic Practice and Methodology
Brooklyn Street Art:For the exhibition for the Fresh A.I.R. you are using cyanotype printing on cotton-rag paper and making a quilt with some of them, positioning photography within a tactile, craft-based framework. Could you elaborate on how this interplay of image and textile informs the conceptual and affective dimensions of the project?
Dylan Mitro: My concept for this work involved printing cyanotypes on cotton rag paper and quilting them together, sourcing the material from a 1980’s and 1990’s Gay Tourist Publication titled ‘Berlin Von Hinten’ by Bruno Gmünder. This journey of research has been such a vast exploration of Berlin’s history, I felt I was having to sew together the LGBTQIA+ history that I was learning, as an attempt to retell stories of the community here in Berlin. Through the cyanotype sun printing process, the images were printed one print at a time, so it was unpredictable how they would turn out. Once I had 100s of these prints finished, it was clear that some turned out more visible than others with ghost-like qualities. This process felt very metaphorical to our LGBTQIA+ history and how a lot of these people, places and stories had been lost to time.
I decided to compose the cyanotypes like a quilt with both the photographs, advertisements and maps of Berlin’s; Gay, Lesbian Bars, Cafes, Discos, Travesti clubs, and sex shops. It felt like I was sewing back together a mere echo of these places and their stories from Berlin in the 1980s and 1990s. These two decades of the 1980s and 1990s are so poignant in the community, connected to the AIDS epidemic. As a Queer artist I try to navigate and understand further how to measure the loss the community faced in this time. With my body of work titled ‘Inherited Thread’ to both refer physically to the ways I have quilted together the cyanotype prints, but also to refer to the process this research has taken me on, in threading together the question of how, we as the next generation of the LGBTQIA+ community inherit the stories and spaces of those that came before us.
BSA: You will be drawing extensively on archival materials from Berlin Von Hinten (1981–1997). How do you approach the ethical and aesthetic considerations of working with such archives—particularly when recontextualizing them within a contemporary queer landscape?
DM: I think when dealing with any LGBTQIA+ historical material, you have to understand how personal perspective affects your lens, as the landscape within the community has changed. There was much to consider when dealing with a body of work like the ‘Berlin Von Hinten’. First, this book was mainly made for ‘Gay’ male tourists, looking to explore the homosexual life of Berlin, but was not limited to just that perspective. It shared both Trans and Lesbian spaces in its publication as well. But when dealing with the ethics of the ‘Berlin Von Hinten’ publication itself, it is necessary to acknowledge that it was made from and for a masculine, predominantly white gay male clientele.
So I had to acknowledge that, though this was a rich part of Berlin’s LGBTQIA+ history, it was certainly a limited perspective and not the full picture of the scene. Looking at any ‘Gay’ history, you have to acknowledge how prejudice and exclusionary rhetoric within the scene was certainly present and still exists in the present. I was approaching these books as a Gender Queer artist who is also a tourist trying to discover Berlin but from a contemporary lens. Approaching the research and acknowledging the influence this publication had within the Gay community is important. This work has not been intended to criticize the publication but to celebrate the way it was able to so intimately time capsule part of the 1980s and 1990s Gay scene here in Berlin through its writing, mapping and photography.
A majority of the aesthetics I was interested in were the advertisements in the publication. A lot of the focus is catered to the homoerotic, macho, masculinity. This aesthetic is not what I personally prescribe to. Still, I find the use of this homoerotic aesthetic to market sexually charged spaces for Gay tourism at a time within the peak of the AIDS epidemic very interesting. So all of this was considered as I worked through these published books.
BSA: You will be creating/presenting many of these historical photos and places re-photographed. What is the protocol for doing this?
DM: I could not have started any of this research without the support and access to the wonderful Schwules Museum Library and archive. I owe a lot of this research to their continued support. My protocol to present these historical photos was to take high-quality scans of these pages within the Berlin Von Hinten. These pages included photos of rare glimpses into the interiors of LGBTQ+ spaces in Berlin in the 1980s and 1990s. I recorded all of the accreditation of photographers that were published within the book and reprinted them within my research. As I was researching, I wasn’t only collecting photographs of these establishments but also their advertised addresses.
After the scans were finished, I created my own photo negatives on transparent acetate paper of the historical images. These photo negatives were made to print cyanotype copies of the images. After I digitally documented the addresses of these spaces into a Google Maps folder to create a digital map of where these places existed. From there, I was able to understand which of these places were still open and operating as the same business 40 years later. From the 200 businesses I documented, only 12 were still open; operating under the same name. So as a part of the project I visited some of those establishments and worked to photograph them the way they were in the original book 40 years later.
BSA:When you revisit surviving venues to echo the 1980s interior shots, how do you determine vantage point, focal length, framing, and lighting to balance fidelity to the historical images with your own authorial choices? What does re-photographing do in reference to history?
DM: I approached the photographs more organically, trying to document these spaces in a way that would allow for the environment’s ambience to speak for itself and for it to be understood within the photographs. I wanted to think if these photos were to be viewed in 40 years from now, how could these be a documentation of the spaces themselves, like the photos from the Berlin Von Hinten. I made sure to photograph the rooms without any customers in them, as the photos were more about the environment. I am attempting to continue the documentation and archive these current spaces as they are now, before they are lost to time. So it does feel like I am continuing the narrative of archiving to prevent the story of these places from being lost.
BSA: Provenance, description, and preservation must be a challenging process: What is your workflow for recording provenance and metadata (dates, addresses, names/roles, consent, cross-references to Berlin von Hinten) and for long-term preservation (file naming, etc)?
DM: My attempt at cataloging my findings and recording the metadata of researching was for a more artistic storytelling approach. To organize each of the places I had researched with its photograph, advertisements, and descriptions on each page. Recording when these places were established and which ones still exist. There are pages I have dedicated to crediting the authorship of these previous Berlin Von Hinten publications.
In the conversation around long-term preservation, I would consider my approach to be more artistic than technical. I still have to remind myself that this work is from the lens of an artistic practice over the short course of 10 months, and with that I feel it is still a work in progress with the intention of creating dialogue involving an open-ended question: how do we approach the idea of Inheritance of history within our LGBTQIA+ communities? – the answer is one that we each have to seek out and learn for ourselves. I have been working in LGBTQIA+ archives for years now, and it’s overwhelming how much material there is within the archives to be rediscovered. I hope others are inspired to dive into it.
II. Community, Space, and Memory
BSA:Central to the project are spaces such as Pussy Cat Bar and Eisenherz Book store, both historically significant to Berlin’s queer community. Can you talk about navigating the process of documenting these living spaces in a manner that both honors their historical legacies and engages with their present realities?
DM: The spaces I have photographed and interviewed were documented with very different approaches based on their history and contemporary positioning. Pussy Cat has been around since 1974, founded by two lesbians, and has always had its doors open to all, being very inclusive. When I photographed their space, I wanted to capture the ambience. The bar’s essence owes much to Daniela, Pussycat’s owner from 1998 until her death in November 2020; she’d worked there since 1982. Her former sidekick “Donna” (an employee since ’85) now runs the show, preserving Daniela’s legacy. I included portraits of the owner Donna and Jan, a young bartender who has been working there for just a few years. I spoke to Donna about the history of the bar, hearing stories about its legacy. While with Jan, I spoke about what it means for the next generation to be coming to a spot like Pussy Cat. I asked about the current climate, of the importance of a bar like Pussy Cat, and how it fosters intergenerational connections.
For Eisenherz Bookstore, it had a huge significance to Queer history here in Berlin. It is the longest-standing LGBTQIA+ bookstore in all of Europe. It opened in 1978, as a Gay bookstore called Prinz Eisenherz located at Bülowstraße 1, just down the street from my studio here at Fresh A.I.R. and across the street from where this project will be exhibited. Eisenherz is where the story of my research starts, as the founders of Berlin Von Hinten – Bruno Gmünder and Christian Von Maltzahn were two of the five founders of the Prinz Eisenherz bookstore.
When I photographed and interviewed the current owners of the Eisenherz, Roland Müller-Flashar and Franz Brandmeier, they talked about their involvement in the business since the 1980s. We spoke about how they changed the name and made the bookstore more inclusive over the years. They still to this day host book readings and gallery openings. As a business, I talked to them about their legacy and how vital their store is to the community. They shared with me photographs of the official opening in 1978 to contribute to the publication of the work. I photographed portraits of the owners and their colleagues to create a current time capsule of their store and the ones who keep it running. In a climate of LGBTQIA+ book bannings, it’s a significant social fabric for the community to access history and current local and international voices.
BSA:When you engage with events such as the Community Dyke March and Christopher Street Day, your work intersects with both activist and celebratory dimensions of queer visibility. How did your immersive engagement with these communities inform your visual and conceptual strategy or the outcome?
DM: I intend to document Queer history as a celebration. However, I cannot ignore that Pride is also a protest. I felt compelled to capture the ongoing struggles the community still faces and the freedoms we must continue to fight for. While in residence, there was Berlin Pride in July, and within 24 hours, there were three marches that I wanted to document. There was the Community Dyke March, the Christopher Street Day March, and the International Queer Pride for Liberation March. I think it is powerful to show those who show up in the streets, and to document their power.
Activism and celebration are not binary, and to celebrate the strength of their ability to show up in the streets and fight for rights and freedoms is important. I think it is essential to acknowledge how easy it is for us to forget the sacrifices that have given us our freedoms today. We are here today with the rights and freedoms we have because of the elders who came before us, and the activism in the streets they did. There is still so far to go, and I think it’s important to document and archive the ongoing fight for future generations to witness the brave trailblazers of today.
BSA:You’re pairing your visual works with interviews and a book, integrating oral histories with photographic documentation. What are the narratives and/or perspectives you’re most focused on to share with the public?
DM: I will have a book that will document the whole journey of my research and where it leads. This includes how many of these LGBTQIA+ spaces are on the verge of disappearing as the community shifts. I look to ask the community what it means to inherit these histories. How is the torch passed on and how can we find more intergenerational connections, threading a link to the past and finding more of a moral responsibility to them instead of just approaching them from the position as a consumer.
BSA:The inclusion of archival artifacts—such as pieces of the original mural wall outside Connection club and printed publications like Berlin Von Hinten—places in the foreground a dialogue between image, object, and place. How do these material elements shape the way people can react to your work?
DM: For the project to include archival artifacts like the Berlin Von Hinten publication and pieces of the exterior mural from Connection Club, I want to bring attention to the value and importance of these objects visually. For the Connection Club mural, it was unexpectedly demolished as I was in my residency, and I actively became a part of the project unexpectedly. The mural on the exterior of Connection Club was a large display of Gogo dancers and Drag Queens painted in 1997. The entire mural was coming down without any means of preserving it. I believe this was probably the Largest and oldest gay mural in the Schonenberg neighbourhood, and there was no relative concern about attempting to preserve it. So I decided to photograph and document the demolition and went into the dumpster of rubble to collect some of the broken pieces of the mural to exhibit as a part of the exhibition. It was an unexpected moment in the project that encapsulated the work into a physical object. We aren’t just losing the spaces for the community; we are also losing the artworks on their walls and the stories they tell. So having it in the exhibition allows the viewer to witness the continued deterioration of Queer spaces and the current climate.
BSA: Berlin’s queer history is both deeply entrenched and dynamically evolving. How do you situate your work within this broader historical continuum, and what conversations do you hope it sparks within institutional and public contexts?
DM: Berlin’s Queer history is so deep, it is why I was first drawn to this city. But I think once I arrived and started my research, I was so overwhelmed by how vast that history was. I didn’t know where to start or how to encapsulate it into a project. But I think once I familiarize myself with the context of how I am approaching Berlin, I can ask questions in my work without trying to answer them. I wanted to hopefully have people ask their own questions of how do we inherit our Queer histories, how do we memorialize not just the grief we endured, but to memorialize it.
To familiarize ourselves with how our community has come together throughout history to fight for the freedoms that can so easily be taken away—and are actively being taken away now. At a time when the digital age is isolating us further from each other, I hope this work encourages the public to find importance in our histories and actively engage with it. I wanted people to visit and support these places that are still around and respect their deep historical roots. I wanted to find the threads that link what we enjoy and consume today within the community because of what came before us. Hopefully more people will be inclined to go to places like Pussy Cat, Eisenherz bookstore, or the Schwules Museum Library Archive to find stories they are interested in finding out more about.
BSA:Did you find it difficult for the subjects you were pursuing to engage with you and to open up more with their stories and legacy? What are the challenges for an artist and researcher like you when asking people to be frank and open with you about their stories?
DM: From the beginning, I knew as an English-speaking outsider from Canada, I had to accept that I was approaching this project from that perspective. I did have some apprehensions at the beginning about approaching people to ask more about the history because I wanted to make sure I had enough knowledge of the history to ask the right questions. But I tried my best to immerse myself in the community to understand and feel what type of climate it truly is. Thankfully, the residence was located right in the heart of the historic Gay district of Schöneberg. From leather cruising bars to the Gay cafes, I visited them all, and within the context of being an outsider trying to learn more about the history of these places, I had to be patient.
As a Documentary film director, I have done many interviews in my life, so I am familiar with talking with strangers, but it was essential to gain trust with them. I do think that because I don’t speak German there was certainly a barrier to get through to get the most intimate version of the stories but there was a ‘matter of fact’ approach that most people I talked to gave. I noticed that each of the people I interviewed had a very clear understanding of ‘How things are now’. The community relies heavily on tourism, so its clientele has a transient mentality. I could really get a sense from each of them that it’s still a lot of work to keep up running a business and it’s not easy.
So for me to come in to ask questions and take up their time, I needed to be patient and work with them on their terms. Some places were more difficult than others, getting myself into some interesting situations, as some were quite closed off. In those moments, I had to respect their choices and pivot just to accept that there are countless other stories to focus on. For those who were open and invited me into their world to listen to their stories, I am eternally grateful. I hope that more Queers my age understand their responsibility to the community and become more interested in LGBTQIA+ history. It’s our obligation as the next generation to not only be consumers of the culture but to become active participants within the framework in an effort to keep these LGBTQIA+ spaces and stories alive.
Dylan is an alumnus of Class #10 of Fresh A.I.R. The project is an artist-in-residence program of the Berliner Leben Foundation. Dylan is the first recipient of the Martha Cooper Scholarship for Photography under Fresh A.I.R. They will be exhibiting their project at the Fresh A.I.R. exhibition opening on November 7th.
Fresh A.I.R. Scholarship Exhibition #10
“I AM FLUX: The Freedom of Being and the Possibilities of Becoming”
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 6, 2025, 7–10 PM Exhibition Dates: November 7, 2025 – March 29, 2026 Opening Hours: Tuesday/Wednesday: 10 AM – 6 PM Thursday to Sunday: 12 PM – 8 PM Location: Project Space of the URBAN NATION Museum, Bülowstraße 97, 10783 Berlin
Open House: Saturday, November 8, 2025, 2–8 PM, Bülowstraße 7, 10783 Berlin
For more information about Fresh A.I.R. click HERE
For more LGBTQIA+ related projects under the Fresh A.I.R. Program click the links below:
Berlin brings one of its unsung heroes to a wall this month as part of an Urban Nation mural program. On October 9, 2025, UN inaugurated “Akkord,” the newest addition to its long-running One Wall program—a series built on the premise that it is possible a single wall can carry a powerful message in a community. Created by the Berlin-based collective Innerfields, this mural rises above Schwambzeile 7 in Charlottenburg-Nord, transforming an ordinary apartment façade into a site of memory, artistry, and civic reflection. Following the One Wall charge, it’s meant to be public art with purpose: direct, accessible, and impossible to ignore.
Innerfields, who have operated at various times as a trio and a duo since forming in 1998, are well known in Berlin’s street art community for their blend of figurative realism and symbolic abstraction. Emerging from the city’s graffiti culture, they often explore the interplay between humanity, technology, and nature—our coexistence and our contradictions. Their murals are recognizable for their human subjects rendered with near-classical precision, often set against conceptual frameworks that invite reflection rather than spectacle.
For Akkord, the artists turned their focus to Maria Terwiel, a member of the German resistance executed by the Nazis in 1943 for distributing anti-regime leaflets. The mural’s imagery—Terwiel playing an accordion whose keys morph into those of a typewriter, with the sheet music transforming into the very leaflets she once duplicated—captures the merging of art, intellect, and defiance. The work’s title plays on the dual meaning of “chord” and “accord”: harmony in music, and solidarity in human endeavor.
The concept and design was developed through a workshop with students from the Anna-Freud-Schule and Akkord intends to be as much a pedagogical project as a memorial. It engages young Berliners in reclaiming a silenced voice – and translating history into visual language. In a city that wears its past in layers of paint, Innerfields’ wall may remind us that resistance can take many forms—and that in the right hands, even an accordion can be an instrument of liberty.
GO TO URBAN NATION BERLIN TO READ MORE ABOUT “AKKORD”, INNERFIELDS, AND THE ONE WALL PROJECT
Shoe IS MY MIDDLE NAME. Niels Show Meulman 2016. (photo courtesy of MCL)
Reprinted from the original review by BSA for the Martha Cooper Library.
Graffiti writer, calligrapher, painter, typographer—Meulman’s professional identities have long orbited the written mark. “Shoe Is My Middle Name” gathers those decades-deep orbits into one gravitational field, presenting a mid-career survey whose scale and heft match the artist’s sweeping gestures. Photographs of murals, canvases, and poetry scrolls are sequenced chronologically yet feel rhythmic, echoing the repetitive muscle memory that turns letters into pictures.
The early chapters recall a precocious Amsterdam teen who imported New YorkWild-Style back to Europe after meeting Dondi White, while later spreads document how that fluency in urban letterforms morphed into what critics dubbed “calligraffiti.” Ink splashes, broom-wide strokes, and squeegee drags demonstrate Meulman’s commitment to an all-in mark: once pigment meets surface, there are, as he writes, “no half steps.” Quotes, diary fragments, and the full-page poem “A Writer’s Song” punctuate the visuals, anchoring grand abstractions in an autobiographical voice both swaggering and reflective.
Shoe IS MY MIDDLE NAME. Niels Show Meulman 2016. (photo courtesy of MCL)Shoe IS MY MIDDLE NAME. Niels Show Meulman 2016. (photo courtesy of MCL)
Title: Shoe IS MY MIDDLE NAME Published: Lebowski Publishers / Overamstel. Amsterdam, 2016. Author: Niels Shoe Meulman Language: English
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
