GERMAN CREATIVE MINDS: AN ARTISTIC RIDE THROUGH THE LAND

Germany is a realm of creative arts, such as design, fashion, music…here we take you on a trip through three German cities – Hamburg, Leipzig and Cologne – by introducing to you three different kinds of artists in the universe of street art, fashion, and jewellery.

First stop: Hamburg

MARSHAL ARTS

Street artist Marshal Arts has Chilean roots but is based in Hamburg, and – armed with stencils and loads of imagination – provides the public city walls with colours and messages. His stage name derives from his being great in martial arts, and his vision is the city as a playground, his works being the symbol of his ironic approach to life and a tool against the grey concrete walls. His artworks – mostly paste-ups – are gifted to everyone passing by in the streets, he leaves his colourful mark on the big plain walls all around Hamburg with heroes and characters of his childhood, or social subjects dear to him which he represents in an exaggerated, ironic way. Sometimes, the positioning as well is important : he places his works intelligently so that they have a kind of correlation with the spot where they’re arranged.

And there’s more! As a matter of fact, he also makes personalized cans decorated with spray paint and acryl and t-shirts with prints of some of his creative paste-ups.

Second stop: Leipzig

URBAN PRIVACY

The Leipzig innovative brand URBAN PRIVACY is the result from the combination between two different realities and backgrounds: computer science and fashion design. We hardly notice that, while simply walking in the streets, we’re surveiled by cameras all over the place. In other words, we live in a world where our privacy seems to be rather fragile and mined by artificial intelligence and more and more sophisticated technologies. Designer Nicole Scheller and computer scientist Marcel Göbe conceived URBAN PRIVACY to prevent our identity to be completely captured in public spaces by those devices trough a counter-surveillance design strategy. These are the two main pieces of URBAN PRIVACY collection: URBAN GHOST and FACECEPTION.

The main idea behind URBAN GHOST is to protect the privacy of who is wearing the coat by deceiving the infrared LED cameras used to scan our face in the darkness thanks to a ring-shaped LEDs structure in the hood. In this way, when the infrared light of the camera projects it onto the wearer, the LEDs on the hood activate generating the same infrared light, so overloading the camera sensors. Besides, the material used to produce URBAN GHOST doesn’t let body heat out, making it a powerful tool against thermal cameras as well.

FACECEPTION, instead, aims at protecting our biometric data thanks to a black and white pattern, the same used by cameras to detect and match faces during the day. In so doing, the coat makes it difficult for those cameras to distinguish the real face from the pattern of the garment.

Third stop: Cologne

CAROLIN DIELER

She’s a young designer based in Cologne and graduated in Design at Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts. Her dream was to become a fashion designer but in time she discovered a great passion for jewellery and therefore decided to graduate with a jewellery collection, called ‘Sublime Devastation’. This 28-pieces collection reflects the common reasoning behind her work – her goal is to make people aware of the fact that we’re part of the nature around us and we must not compromise it.

Apart from this “watery” collection, which is inspired by the ocean-human relationship, she also created a limited edition in collaboration with Loan Favan’s brand Naula_Studio. + 1.2 is the name of this collection that originates from the latest huge fires which have devastated California, and which were caused by the increase of the global temperature by + 1.2 degrees. The pieces are characterised by orange details, the color prevailing in the shooting atmosphere as well – just like the color dominating the Californian sky during the fires. With her creations, Carolin aims at making people rethink their place in the world, acting sustainably and consciously.

Article by

Melissa Ambrosetti