Berlin street art, Teufelsberg, murals and paste-ups are public conditions of a wider Sketchy Shona practice across painting, objects, tattoos and rooms.
The wall is only one condition
I do not think of myself as a mural painter who happens to make other things. Berlin street art is one condition in which the work becomes public. A wall, passage, former listening station, festival stage or neighbourhood route changes how an image is seen.
The mark has to survive weather, movement, scale and the fact that most people did not come to see it. That pressure is part of the work. It is different from gallery attention, but it is not less serious.
Teufelsberg keeps a longer record
The Teufelsberg Urban Art Gallery records place the work in a specifically Berlin street-art context across 2022, 2024 and 2025. Paste-ups, murals and public interventions put the drawing language inside a living city rather than on a neutral white wall.
That is why the archive needs the location, year, conditions and role, not only a photograph. Public work is evidence of the practice, not its whole definition.
From the street into a room
The same visual language can move from a Berlin wall into a tattoo, painting, piece of furniture, festival stage or installation. The surface changes, but the question stays close: what does a figure do when it has to hold a real place and real attention?
DA SWAMP made that movement visible. Drawings, tattoos, objects, bodies and the room became one temporary event at The Floor. Street art is part of that wider system.
Berlin is a working condition
Berlin is not a backdrop I use to make the work look more interesting. It is a working condition, with its own speed, clubs, artists, ruins, independent rooms and public arguments about who gets to belong where.
I want the street-art archive to keep the specific places and relationships that let an image leave the studio and enter public life, rather than preserving a fantasy of Berlin.
Credits
- Original Sketchy Shona studio editorial based on the public archive and artist writing.