All posts tagged: EXOT DIAMONDS

This week we’re hitting Berlin and Prague on a quick-turn street survey, looking at how each city is evolving its own visual language in real time. You feel the contrast immediately: Berlin may still carry the reputation for boundary-stretching experimentation, but Prague is stepping forward with its own confident push — inventive palettes, disciplined letterforms, and murals that challenge the assumptions of what belongs in a city celebrated for its Gothic and Baroque silhouettes. Where Berlin is sprawling now with more sanctioned façades and yet an intense train graffiti scene, Prague concentrates its energy into transitional zones and tight networks of writers and muralists. Both cities are accelerating — but Prague surely has a particular spark right now, maybe because it’s new to us, or because you can divine a kind of tension between reverence and rebellion that makes walls talk in new ways.

Berlin’s streets are currently balancing big, commissioned façade murals with a still-active, letter-based graffiti scene that keeps pushing trains, rooftops, and hidden spots. Artists and writers are freely mixing spray paint with stencils, paste-ups, installations, and interventions, turning infrastructure and abandoned spaces into experimental laboratories. Political and social commentary remains central and fully reflects the conversations you hear, with quick-strike formats like posters and stickers addressing gentrification, migration, targeted geopolitical screeds, and a sense of increasing surveillance. At the same time, more legal and curated walls are emerging, opening opportunities for scale and collaboration while possibly sharpening a tension with the underground scene. If that’s a correct assessment, Berlin points toward an even sharper split: increasingly hybrid mural practices on sanctioned surfaces and faster, more disruptive actions in the rest of contested spaces, which tourists may not sense are diminishing, but locals assure you they are.

Smaller in scale than Berlin but fueled by a strong talent pool, Prague’s hybrid of academically inclined muralism and street-taught graffiti culture feels agile and confident. It is a city where the past stands tall, and the future writes itself across the margins. Maybe you would say it thrives on a tension between its historic Gothic and Baroque architecture and a new generation that likes to test what belongs elsewhere on the city’s walls. You’ll find those who push a hybrid language of abstract fields, figurative lines, and unconventional color, and others inject an assertive brand of pop-inflected text and graphic punch. As it is the 21st century, we are interested in finding conceptual figures we hear about who are raising questions about public space and control. At the same time, the graffiti scene keeps the pulse fast and restless: rooftops, tunnels, and rail corridors loaded with wild palettes, overlapping styles, and formats that nod to tradition, while stretching its edges. You’ll find most of this in transitional spaces — industrial seams, construction coverings, legal walls, and edges just beyond the postcard views.

Here is a quick drop into a melange of things we found in both for our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring 1UP Crew, B.S., Caer8th, Dibs, Exit RIP, EXOT Diamonds, Gunther Schaefer, MORT RIP, ONG, Paradox, Phoebe Graphy, Tona, XOXO, ZMG, and Zosen Bandito.