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Reviews
Schablone
is an artists' book as well as a book of documentation, presenting
stencil graffiti from the streets of contemporary Berlin. The
book consists of over 100 color photographs showing not only the
graffiti, but also its placement within the confines of Germany's
most international metropolis. The introduction examines the semiotic
and performative aspects of stencils within the contexts of art
history, media, and urban anthropology.
"This art and text project by Caroline Koebel
and Kyle Schlesinger is a loving drift through the streets of
Berlin to examine and to be inspired by its raw, lively, lustful,
sometimes esoteric stencil culture. Exquisitely photographed,
this work plays in the in-betweens of poetics and politics, the
trivial and the insightful, the amusing and the disturbing, the
immediate and the aloof. One way or another, this book will seduce
you."
—Critical Art Ensemble
Contemporary trackers on the trail of an esoteric
species, Koebel and Schlesinger have captured a gallery of transitory
signs from the surface of Berlin's walls. The very sign of urbanism,
these swiftly made images depend on a community of knowing readers
to recognize their codes, nod, and signal back across the space
of time and geography. The city is the site, scene, of a whole
system of traces and communications. The marks show their ephemerality
and questionable legality in the very stealth mode of their production.
Stencilled, spray painted, rapidly produced, they haunt the walls
with their fading imagery, semaphore signals in a common but still-specialized
system, introducing their alternative image-speak into the regulated
zones of public discourse. A beautiful collection, thoughtfully
framed by its introduction.
—Johanna Drucker
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