text and photographs by Alexandra Belopolsky

I've been following his strange creatures for years. Fox-like predators with sharp teeth, giant birds with menacing beaks, monstrous fish. All staring at the passersby through big, human-like eyes full of sadness. You can see them all over Tel Aviv - on crumbling buildings and electrical cabinets, on walls and on rooftops, in hidden corners and in plain sight. Klone Yourself (or simply, Klone) is one of Israel's most prolific and creative street artists. His pseudonym is a comment on the modern lifestyle. "We all go to school, enlist in the army, carry smartphones, watch TV – it's a form of self-cloning. We all follow a norm. The point is to be a different type of clone, a clone of yourself, so to say. An original one".

I meet him at his studio, in a warehouse in Tel Aviv. Looking at him you would never guess that this 29 year old guy, of average height and build and straightforward features, is the mind behind some of the most haunting images of the city. Throughout our conversation he never stops cutting shapes - on August 23rd he opens his first solo exhibition abroad at the Urban Spree gallery in Berlin, and there is still much work to be done. It will be a massive paper installation, mostly in black, white and brown, akin to the one he presented in Tel Aviv in 2011. Klone's art varies in accordance to the location – his gallery work, his street work and his studio work are all inherently different. "I believe that what's done in the street should stay in the street. A gallery is a completely different stage, and it needs to be treated differently in terms of space and medium".

This moto is carried into his street art as well – he never repeats the same work, making it a point to create something unique for every place where he leaves his mark, especially in the past few years. "I no longer paint simply for the sake of there being a painting", he clarifies, "I paint for the sake of leaving a particular painting on a specific location". Recently, his palette changed as well, leaving the bright multi-colored works a thing of the past. "I don't see the need for color now", he says. "I can now express myself well without hiding behind the colors. A lot of times when you create a colorful work, the viewer is hooked on the colors. I like dealing with my subject by going down to the basics – black and white, and maybe an additional color. I think it tells a lot more about me as an artist, in the same way that a good sketch tells more about an artist than some amazing painting where you can't see the brush strokes".

As someone working in a field where his work can be, and often is, destroyed at any given moment, Klone is more than comfortable with that risk. He has been known to go back and paint over locations where his previous work has been erased, sometimes several times on the same spot. But that, to him, is an essential part of being an artist, street or otherwise. "Things need to be erased and renewed", he states, presenting a philosophy that might sound radical. "Nothing should be eternal .I think it would do the art world a lot of good if we were to dilute about 10 percent of it every year. This incisive preoccupation with what's already been done… Just the sheer costs of storing all that! When they could have gone into supporting young art and new generations. How many people do you know who have actually seen the real Mona Lisa? Is that really important? It's already public domain as far as images on the internet go. No one has actually seen it. People know the image, they learn about it, but when you go to look at it you find some picture behind glass as thick as a wall and guards. You don't get to really see it."

The Berlin exhibition came about after the curator of the gallery discovered online the book which Klone had independently published last year – a collection of works he describes as a travelogue. It was the curator's first encounter with the artist's work, in spite of the fact that there are places in Berlin (as well as Amsterdam, Paris and Saint Petersburg) where he left creative testimonies of his previous visits to the city. But perhaps it is understandable, since he makes sure to choose the less central and more run-down spots for his art wherever he goes. "I want to relate to a place that accepts me", he says when I wonder whether painting in a posh part of the city may not be considered as a challenge, to bring his world view to the people who want to hear it the least. "In an overly primped area the painting would look like mere decoration, regardless of how subversive it might be. The most subversive work, if you put it in a gallery in a nice frame, under good lighting, would look like something to be hung in some rich man's living room. I prefer to work in less groomed areas."

Yet groomed or not, painting in a city where he doesn't live is a completely different experience for Klone: "I'm not used to how the city reacts to me. It's a different vibe. When I travel, I stay in the city for a while and only then do I paint something. But it still doesn't feel like, say, Berliner art. It feels like my own art. When I paint in Tel Aviv it's different, it's a part of Tel Aviv. It's Tel Aviv art".

Klone was not, however, born in Tel Aviv. He was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, back when it was the USSR. When he was 11 years old his family immigrated to Israel. The uprooting from his home and the displacement did not come easy for the young boy. Five years later he took up a can of paint and, years before evolving into street art, joined the world of graffiti tagging. For the young émigré struggling to fit in, it felt natural. It was a way of bringing himself out, of leaving his mark on Israeli society, of saying "Here I am!". He was not the only one – many graffiti and street artists were immigrants. They still are - Klone is a member of a group of artists, which include such locally well-known names as Know Hope, Foma and Zerocents – all immigrants. They hang out together, and often go out on painting missions together. Some might argue that perhaps it was the immigration experience that turned them into street artists in the first place. "Had we stayed in Ukraine, I would probably have become an engineer, like half the people there", laughs Klone. Seems as though design of urban spaces is in his blood, after all.

by Karolina Golimowska

If you take train line 7 from Manhattan, you can watch the streets of Queens through the windows. It is a sunny day in spring, the train is pleasantly half-full, we leave the Downtown skyline behind us and enter Long Island City. Outside, at a crossing a bus is burning, orange flames reach for the sky. I can hear a siren speeding up, the train keeps going. On the next stop a dark-haired man wearing a sombrero enters the carriage. He is selling Oreo cookies 1,50 dollar a package of two. Nobody is buying. I get off at Jackson Hights and change to the E train that takes me past LaGuardia Airport and Forest Hill to Kew Gardens.

by Juliette Vazard

The city rally organized in Lodz, in parallel with the exhibition “Einblicke” (“Insights”) taking place in the Prexer Culture Centre, represented for me an unmissable opportunity, or perhaps an excuse, to make my way back to Lodz. Forming the only foreign team of the game in Lodz, together with the German Marcel, we got to know the city, its creative spots and inhabitants in the most intense and exciting way!

Insights to the mysterious treasure chest, photo: Sandra Wickert

The rally started on plac Wolnosci (“Liberty square”), under the heavy rain than had replaced the thick snow and the icy wind which had blown on the city the whole morning. A young man in a long black coat was preaching through a loudhailer about the Meaning of Life –which the wisest and luckiest among us shall have the unique opportunity to discover during the game. When we received the first clues, the Lodzians started running and the rally was on! We first followed as we could, but soon we split in different routes and started evolving from one task to another: “cooking” and eating a typical Berliner dish - the famous “Currywurst”!- in a home in which we were warmly invited by a young woman from Lodz ; driving a rickshaw ; creating a piece of jewellery out of rubbish (drawing inspiration from the artists of the “Tacheles” in Berlin) ; composing a postcard for Berlin out of German newspapers and magazines, etc. Tasks where also given in which we had to cooperate through skype conference with a team playing in Berlin, for example to look at old black and white pictures, and find out whether they were from Lodz or from Berlin. Of course, the game made us walk through the whole city centre, from the plac Wolnosci to the various university buildings and to the theatre, getting the chance to admire in passing the impressive colourful murals that spread on several walls of the city.

At each step, we were asked questions which we had to answer anonymously in writing: “What was the most important event in your life?”, “What scares you most?”, “Which place in your city do you most like visiting?”, an so on. We were also asked to interview people in the streets: “If there was one question you could ask to someone you do not know, to get to know him/her better, what would it be?” These questions are closely related to the current exhibition “Einblicke” (“Insights”) at the Prexer, which is the result of a project realised with the Studienkolleg of Berlin, in which thirty people in Normandy, Transylvania, Lodz and Berlin were interviewed on the basis of the same questionnaire, containing such very personal questions.

Originally a fabric for projectors, the Prexer was turned into a cinema, and is now hosting a dynamic Culture Centre, run by a group of very energetic and creative young people, who propose their help to anyone who steps in with an innovative project and the will to realise it. In a post-industrial city where the unemployment rate is particularly high at the moment, and from which more and more people are moving away, personal initiative and creative ideas to revitalize the activity are most welcome. It was in the Prexer that the game ended, where prizes were awarded to the teams which had collected most points, for their creativity, originality, rapidity, and of course knowledge of the Berliner culinary tradition! While a cloud of smoke invaded the lounge where we were seated, a mysterious suitcase was brought for the winner team to unlock and discover the meaning of life: an installation with a large mirror in which they could see…themselves!

In accordance with the principles on which the “Einblicke” project was based, the game offered me an original and fun way to catch a glimpse into the way people in Lodz live, as well as address them and myself with fundamental, personal questions. If I probably did not find the meaning of life during this rich and intense day in Lodz, I definitely got closer to it.

Watching monkeys at a zoo, one can never be quite sure who is observing whom. During one of my few visits to Berlin’s Zoologischer Garten, a smart little caged creature held its hands to its face as if holding an imaginary camera. It looked at me through the thus formed frame, and I was almost sure I glimpsed an ironic smile. Even if it was but a clever imitation of the gesture the observant creature is surely often faced with, and even if I project too much of an anthropomorphic interpretation, it still made me realize how arbitrary that role division was—the fact that I am on this side of the cage, having paid to look inward.

Filmstill, Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin

Observation is both the main topic as well as the main formal characteristic of Bestiaire directed by Denis Côté. We observe the concentrated faces of young people during a drawing session—their eyes move back and forth between the animal on the paper and the object, which is disclosed as a stuffed animal at the moment of the last shot; a safari park during a snowy winter with animals walking outside, while others from warmer climates are locked indoors; taxidermists going about their work, creating frozen counterparts of what we just saw alive; and, finally, the summer crowds of visitors apparently so busy taking photos of the animals that they actually fail to see them.

The observational character of the film is further enhanced by its form. The camerawork is carefully pre-composed and static from the very first scene. Even the focus plane remains at the same depth while subjects move in and out of it. As an introduction to the film screening, Côté recalled a remark made by a viewer at the Sundance Film Festival: “This film is about an audience watching a film.”

Indeed, Bestiare’s technique reminds me of another, unfortunately quite unknown film entitled Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003) by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Therein too, during the long, static scenes in which almost nothing happens, a reflective process is initiated in the viewer, who thus becomes aware of and preoccupied with the process of watching itself. In Bestiaire, this effect is even stronger. The animals we observe do not hide their awareness of the camera’s presence and often look directly at it. Sometimes, it becomes so unsettling to sit in the dark while a melancholic bull is staring at you from the screen for minutes, that the film inevitably tries to relieve the tension by cutting to a comical intermezzo—an ostrich, with its long neck and big eyes, which expresses nothing, really nothing else, but curiosity.

Filmstill, Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin

This film obviously does not pretend to be ordinary entertainment. It is also full of ethical connotations. It is the pity we feel for the animals that have to spend long, cold winters in bleak cramped spaces made of concrete and metal; anxious, nervous or just looking desperate. It is the taxidermic techniques of separating skin from flesh and flesh from bone that provoke disgust, a feeling closely connected with our sense of morality. The title itself refers us to the illustrated compendiums of animals that have placed such creatures in a religiously moralizing textual context; for example, the presentation of pelicans that pull out their chest feathers in order to feed their young ones on their own blood, thus saving them from starvation, as an allegory to Jesus’ sacrifice in order to save the sinners from eternal death.

February 12 2012, Sylvain Corbeil, Denis Côté, Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin

Having said that, the director’s vehement denial that this beautiful and unusual film’s ethical component is something arbitrary, and only something the viewer may or may not “project into it”, was somewhat irritating. Of course, no artistic work can be reduced to its moral message, but when the latter is as powerful and as well-aligned with the aesthetic form as in Bestiaire, such a dismissal seems suspect. The silent producer, who stood by the director’s side during the Q&A session that followed the screening, could not introduce any more clarity regarding the question: Why deny?

(Bestiare’s last screening is on Thursday, February 16 at 22:45 in Kino Arsenal.)

Berlin will not miss Schönefeld as much as it will miss Tempelhof, or even Tegel. This parting will be nowhere near as emotional because the Schönefeld airport will not disappear, nor even change its purpose. The site will still function as an airport, receiving a bigger, more lucid terminal with an integrated train station, other facilities and a new identity—SXF will become BER.

Yes, BER and not BBI as we previously thought. The latter IATA abbreviation is already taken and will be put on your checked-in luggage only if your destination is Biju Patnaik International Airport in Bhubaneswar, India. But maybe this is even better; at least the three letters are part of the word ’Berlin’, as if to make it up for the fact that the airport is actually not a part of Berlin geographically, but rather located in Brandenburg.



Günter Wicker (Photur) // Berliner Flughäfen

Anyhow, the current runway will still be used, probably the same runway from which by the end of WWII around fourteen thousand airplanes had taken off, planes newly built by the Henschel aircraft plant. Berlin–Schönefeld started its career as a factory airfield. After the war, the Soviets stripped Henschel of its equipment—which was then transported to the USSR to fix soviet trains and kolkhoz machinery—and ordered the building of a civil airport on the demilitarized site. Aeroflot, at that time the largest airline in the world, was thus the first to operate from Schönefeld. So the first civil flight to take off from there surely headed eastward, as probably did the last Henschel aerial weapon. The new outlooks have an eastward orientation too, as it is anticipated that Berlin Brandenburg International Airport will become the main European hub for flights to Eastern Europe, Asia and the Far East.

The next phase in the life of the Schönefeld airport was one of decline, brought on by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. In the 1990s everything was moving westward, and everything western was given preference. The airlines too favoured the cooler, more central and symbolically more meaningful airports of West Berlin, and the number of passengers using what used to be the main airport of the German Democratic Republic, rapidly decreased.



Günter Wicker (Photur) // Berliner Flughäfen

However, as the low-budget airlines gradually become the modern air ‘superpowers’, the somewhat distant and not-that-cool airport gained significance once again. RyanAir, EasyJet and Germanwings stirred it from its post-communist lethargy and divided it into new sectors of influence, each coloured according to the specific, non-ideological corporate design: blue with a yellow outline, mighty orange, purple on metal, and so on. Berlin, as a cheap-but-sexy destination, attracts more and more tourists and SXF has gradually developed into what it is today EasyJet’s largest base in continental Europe.

The third metamorphosis is about to happen this summer. Although not everybody stands unanimously united behind this idea, Berlin’s air traffic will be united—it will be centralised at the new airport. This major step could stand in the tradition of the Berlin’s unification pathos, but surprisingly it does not, at least not from the architectural point of view. After closing such significant an airport as Tempelhof, one would expect an internationally-renowned architect to be commissioned for this potentially symbolic replacement. But it won’t be a star like Foster, who referred to Tempelhof as ‘the mother of all airports’, and whose office has excelled with such previous airport projects as Beijing, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Amman and Stansted. Instead, the project was awarded to two local but quite nameless architectural firms, GMP and JSK. More acronyms—that’s right.



Björn Roller // Berliner Flughäfen

Another discrepancy is a visual one. Namely, the disharmonious interplay between the airport’s coiled control tower (which does impress) and the main terminal building, which brings to mind a cheaper-but-bigger version of the minimalism of Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery.

Berlin is slowly leaving its divided past behind and the new airport is another step in that same direction. However, this project will not become a symbol of unity, but rather one of pragmatism. It seems that in Schönefeld things never quite come to a completion; usually, they just take a new form. The opening of a new airport thus follows the trend of previous reorganisation. Schönefeld has always been there for those in need of a quick, cost-efficient and practical solution. Flying used to be a romantic endeavour, but nowadays it’s all about pragmatism. The new romantics take a train or a ship, if they can afford it.

Eurobonds, common debts to be guaranteed by all European countries but spent nationally, are anathema to the German public and German politicians. So it was kind of a surprise hearing Werner Hoyer, Minister of State at the German Federal Foreign Office, declaring “project bonds”, common debts to be guaranteed by all European countries, but spent on a European level, instead of a national one, to be a possible future development.

Mr. Hoyer, who is a possible candidate for the President of the European Investment Bank, what might explain the shift, was answering calls from Italy’s former Prime Minister Giuliano Amato. Both were attending a roundtable on “Changing the debate on Europe” at the Dahrendorf Symposium, held at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin last week. Mr. Amato said: “Let us issue Eurobonds for common projects. Let us give our citizens the feeling of getting more from Europe, nor less! Otherwise: Where should growth come from?”

Yet on what kind of projects the new debts should be spent for, both remained silent. In fact, it seemed, Mr. Amato and Mr. Hoyer intended primarily to make people feel better about the European Union. “We have to make the EU appealing, not a source of constraints”, Mr. Amato said. Citing concerns in Italy and Greece, he added: “Maybe some citizens say: ‘Well, without the pressure from Germany, we would get through our problems much better.’”

Whether or not intended, new, and probably expensive projects, seem to be seen as a possible way out of current euro-skepticism. “When it became nasty, language was not very peaceful anymore”, Mr. Hoyer reminded the audience. The usual legitimization of the EU might not be enough anymore, he fears. “We do need a new narrative on Europe”, Mr. Hoyer said. “We shouldn’t forget the old ones, but we should give people also a new one.”

If project bonds will mark a shift towards higher acceptance of the EU by the public or towards calmer markets remains difficult to judge in advance. To calm markets, which are in panic about a possible default of Greece, that could possibly then lead to further defaults, project bonds seem to be too small, no matter what size they are going to have exactly. To change attitudes towards Europe, project bonds might simply be the wrong answer, as they wouldn’t mean less austerity on a national level and, especially, painful but necessary reforms, to get rid of, for example, the traditional two-tier labor-markets that privilege those who already have got jobs, especially in the state-sector, and the elderly at the expense of those who have not yet found a permanent job and have to live with precarious part-time employments.

Maybe the problems could at least partially be solved by a different, more respectful way of communication. Wolfgang Ischinger, ex-ambassador and Chairman of the Munich Security Conference, and participant at the roundtable, called for more intervention by Europeans into each other’s internal affairs, but also for more emotion. “I believe we are not courageous enough. We have to intervene in each other’s internal affairs more often than we do, but not only negatively”, he said. “I am waiting for the moment when Merkel and Sarkozy will travel to Greece and tell the Greeks that we also love them. Emotional elements matter in Europe, and we need to tell each other that we love each other”.

At times, it seems, politics can be surprisingly romantic. As in every love affair, more romanticism would also mean less independency, though. Are Europeans ready to fall in love with each other with these strings attached?