Claudia Herrmann

I’m Mexican and have been living in Germany for ten years, in my favourite city, Berlin. I studied photography in Barcelona and in my work over the last few years I’ve concentrated on documenting street art in Berlin. The theme of love has been my main focus. The screams, whispers, messages of Street Art accompany us everywhere through the streets of the city, it finds us again and again.

Street art allows the streets to speak, it’s the colour in the streets, it communicates with us, sometimes in code, sometimes directly and clearly. Street art is impulsive, mysterious and risky. Street art is funny, vulgar, provocative and beautiful, just like Berlin. Street art is also the language of immigrants, the expression of protest, of the search for a sense of home, of frustration and uprootedness, of arrival and belonging. Street art is a secret, a clandestine ritual, which gives each individual street artist a shared identity and transforms the sterile walls of urban existence into fragments of memory.

Street art is an art form almost made for a city like Berlin, with its many wounds – its destruction during the war and during the years of the Berlin Wall. Berlin is a city full of desire and aspiration for new arrivals, who bring their illusions and dreams with them. The feelings of the people who live in the city are expressed throughout it in many different ways. With my camera, I want to capture the sketches, murals and graffiti that have been left on buildings, on bridges, walls, underground trains and streets. Some of them are fleeting, but some last months and years. They are personal messages of love that are intended to reach a specific person, but reach us all.