there is something really electric going on in
berlin right now as far as street art is concerned, i can’t exactly explain it,
except perhaps as a combination of the mood of the city itself and a few really
influential people who aide and abet a good cultural phenomena when they see
one.  juergen and micha of href="http://urban_art.info">urban_art.info are two of those such people.
here’s to their efforts. thanks guys!

THE PEOPLE

/>juergen:
1-how long have you been photographing street art in
berlin and what got you started? 
i have been taking pictures for about
18 years, because of growing up in berlin and looking at the people that painted
on the berlin wall, that’s how my passion and interest in street art, and almost
any developments,processes and expressions in the urban enviorment, awoke. i
started taking pictures of the things i really liked at the wall, and that
brought me to start to document for myself what the people do in the streets and
it grew until now where i take pictures and find new sites and places almost
every day and i have developed my own personal style of photographing and ways
of new things.

2-how many pictures do you have?
i do not
really know at the moment, i have been too busy to count, but i think its about
10,000 good ones at the moment and about 40 new films each month.

3-
is it true that you travel a different path everyday?
Yes thats true. i
never take exactly the same route and i almost never travel the straightest
way. thats my way to discover things even in the weirdest places.

4-
what inspired you to start the space urban_art.info?
It was artists that
talked to me and said that i should exibit my photos, which actually never
happened because when i finally got the room,  i was much more interested in
giving that space to the artists i was interested in and that’s how the whole
thing started and grew.

micha:
1-how did you get to know
juergen?
i was one of the first visitors at the first exibition,  because i
was happy to find out that there was somebody who was making a web site and
giving a space to things outside the classical hip-hop/graffiti/writing genre.
this first exibition was with blek le rat, an old stencil hero. at the time (and
still today) i was very fascinated with the things that #spair# does with with
basically everything he getshis hands on, but especially with what he does
with chalk, and juergen’s site was the only place that i was able to find
something about him.

2-how did you decide to work with him on the
space?
at that time he was looking for someone to collaborate with. i was
hanging out there more and more and when we talked, we almost all the time liked
the same things and had a similar view on people and we have a certain kind of
non-verbal-understanding about what needs to be done and in which direction it
should go.  as time went by the project got bigger and there where more and more
plans to realize and too much work for one man to do. so it grew more than being
a desicion.

THE PROJECT.

what are your plans
for the future?

as said before there were more and more plans and
this winter the urban-art.info space will close for about half a year after the
last opening at november the 15th and the following exibition and we will start
to prepare and realize that plans that grew out of the collaboratins and the
visitors we had.  the plans for the next year up to now are: to get prepared for
the new room which will be a little different than the one now. we will invite
the people like we do now and then there will three possibilities or versions
of the space:

first one is to have the room as a basis to work
outside and just show sketches and pictures or stuff like that combined with
photos of what had happened outside in the room.

second one is to
give the room to the people to realize something inside: working directly on the
walls or some kind of concept to realize in the room.  the third one will
probably be the most used one: “the empty room” what means that people could
come up with every kind of idea that we think we can work with and realize it in
the time they are here. we will be in contact the time before the people arrive
and try to prepare what they need.

the two other big plans are to
build a totally new website, and our book: a personal view out of the great
variety of juergens photos of the last 15 years with texts of the people we
collaborated with.  in the new room there should be, if it works out, a library
of all the books we can get and people are giving to us dealing with the subject
of urban art, so that visitors could come and relax and read through books they
love and we are planning to go on selling the stuff the people we worked with
gave to us like prints or shirts and zines from the people we like. So for
suggestions for good zines or for sending us books you want to see in our
library write to:
Juergen Grosse
Uhlandstr.15
10623 Berlin
/>Germany
or to: href="mailto:urbanartinfo@yahoo.com">urbanartinfo@yahoo.com.

one
of the biggest things with all of these plans is to keep it as grounded and
simple as possible and trying as hard as we can to keep out any kind of ideology
and so keep it open to all kinds and variations of ideas and people in any
possible way.

so that are the plans for the winter and of course we
will go on doing our own stuff. so we hope to see all of you that were here
already and many more next year again. we will try to keep you updated.

/> vspace="3" />
1. the outside of the gallery is an ever changing scenery
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2. pic-nic outside the gallery

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3. one of juergen’s many thousand photographs - cbs crew berlin