Airbnb is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a short animated film inspired by a true story. “Wall and Chain” recounts the story of two former border guards, one from each side of divided Berlin, who met by chance in 2012 through Airbnb. You can learn more about the touching story here.
The Moscow Metro now is offering riders access to a virtual library of hundreds of classic novels. The free downloads are accessible via QR codes from station platforms without prior registration. The entire library is also available on buses and trams too. What a great idea for any transit system.
French artist and filmmaker Julien de Casablanca has created a brilliant interactive project for art lovers everywhere. Participants in Outings are encouraged to visit museums and use their phones to photograph “small, secondary and forgotten” paintings and to print out those images and paste them on walls in public spaces. Check out the Outings website and see how you can set some under-appreciated art free in the world.
I love a wacky tourism campaign and this new series created to entice Japanese tourists to Israel is just bizarre and quirky enough to get some attention.
“Israel, Like!” is an anime series that follows sisters Saki and Noriko as they travel around Israel for the first time. The initial installment of seven planned videos is now online. Be sure to turn on the closed-caption option; it’s good for a laugh.
Polish artists Sainer and Bezt, collectively known as Etam Cru, paint enormous humane, touching and sometimes a bit surreal large scale street art murals in urban locales around the world. The duo are currently in Rome for the launch of their first ever solo gallery show. To stave off the boredom while waiting for last weekend’s opening, they created this impressive 8 story painting. The Italian economy may be in the trash, but no one is giving up their morning coffee just yet.
photos: © Blind Eye Factory
By the way, if you’ll be in Rome soon, the show is at the Varsi Gallery at Piazza di San Salvatore in the Centro Storico. And if you go, be sure to swing around the corner to Gelateria Alberto Pica for some of the creamy stuff.
I’m a fanatical museum goer, and I’ve visited all of London’s important cultural institutions, but I’m a lazy slacker compared to Jo Hunt, Mary Rees and Linda Smither. These three Londoners share an obsession to visit every museum in London. With more than 250 museums in the UK capital, they’ve a long road ahead of them.
And speaking of roads, they already have a successful track record in their previous obsessive project to ride every one of London’s 549 bus routes end to end.
You can catch-up on their exploits at London Buses 1 Bus at a Time and then follow along on their museum odyssey on their blog. So far, they’ve hit about 40 museums, but it’s still early days.
I just saw that Penguin Modern Classics will be reissuing William S. Burroughs’ mind-bending cut-up trilogy with some appropriately sinister cover art by Julian House. You may not recognize his name, but House is responsible for some awesome album cover art for the likes of Oasis, Stereolab and The Prodigy.
Germany’s capital city is commemorating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with numerous events both solemn and celebratory. I particularly like the planned trail of thousands of luminous white balloons that will follow the route of the old wall. Called LICHTGRENZE or Border of Light, the project is a collaboration between Christopher Bauder, Marc Bauder and WHITEvoid.
The 8,000 spheres of light on thin supports will “float” at the height of the former wall and follow a 15-kilometer section of the original 140-kilometer wall that cut-off West Berlin from the rest of Europe.
Viewing platforms and information points, along with large viewing screens showing wall documentaries, will be set-up at pivotal locations, such as the Berlin Wall Museum, Mauerpark, Checkpoint Charlie and the East Side Gallery.
The balloons will be illuminated on November 7 and released into the air on November 9 to commemorate the day the Berlin Wall was breached.
On London’s Southwark Street, just south of the River Thames, you’ll find Alex Chinneck’s unnerving, life-size project, A pound of flesh for 50p. Starting as a full-scale, two-story house made out of 8,000 wax bricks, the sculpture will eventually be a mess of rooftop and melted wax by mid-November.
The House of Wax sculpture is part of Merge Festival, an annual series of art, music and performances that draws on the heritage and culture of London’s Bankside. Chinneck’s project celebrates the history of a former candle-making factory from the 18th century. It’s an amazing homage that not only required substantial construction skills, but also entailed the artist spending a year consulting with engineers, chemists and wax manufacturers to develop uncannily convincing bricks that mimic real walls.
The house installation is designed to disintegrate over a month and will also undergo some manual melting over time to shape the façade. The brilliance of using wax as a medium allows for stunning unpremeditated dripping, deforming and morphing.
You can follow the process at the artist’s website or at the Merge Festival site.
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