I visited Tacheles, the famed but now fledgling Berlin art collective. After the Berlin wall came down, the immense drain of people from the East to the West left lots of empty buildings and around that time this group squatted one. The Tacheles art collective thrived from that point on, a warehouse full of studios, artist residences and at one point even a bar, that was all always open to the public. But as East Berlin developed around the group, the worth of their warehouse rose and government pressure was put on the people to pack up. Eventually the artists in the bottom floor of the warehouse took a collective settlement to leave and Tacheles is now hanging by a thread- any day now the remaining people who refused a payout could be evicted. I wish I could have visited the space in its heyday, but I’m glad I was able to experience Tacheles in some sense before its demise. With art inside that spans from abstract acrylic work to lewd collages to tattoos and a structure covered floor to ceiling in graffiti, the space is very much a staple of Berlin.
Photo of me on some of the many steps of Tacheles by Alex Sanchez.
