The original artists of Berlin’s famed Kreuzberg murals have decided to remove their work by painting over the two pieces with black paint. Conceived several years ago by a small team of artists, the murals were painted by Italian street artist BLU and French artist JR. The first murals depicted two figures showing East and West Berlin gang signs attempting to unmask each other, and the other showed a man shackled by gold watches on his wrists.

As the murals attracted increasing attention, rents began to climb and gentrification in the area became rapid. “The city started to use the aesthetics of resistance for its marketing campaigns,” said Lutz Henke, one of the original creators of the murals. “Gentrification in Berlin lately doesn’t content itself with destroying creative spaces. Because it needs its artistic brand to remain attractive, it tends to artificially reanimate the creativity it has displaced, thus producing an ‘undead city’.” In order to combat these occurrences, Henke and the other artists have decided to remove the art.

“Still, why would an artist agree to destroy his own work instead of endorsing official attempts to preserve it as a public work of art? Out of despair? Clearly not. Rather out of sorrow. From the first moment of their existence, Blu’s murals were doomed to disappear. It is the nature of street art to occupy space in celebration of its uncertainty, being aware of its temporality and fleeting existence,” said Henke.

“However, for me the white – well, in this case black – washing also signifies a rebirth: as a wake-up call to the city and its dwellers, a reminder of the necessity to preserve affordable and lively spaces of possibility, instead of producing undead taxidermies of art. It stresses the social function of artistic interventions where others fail to advance.”