BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
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
