Tourists in Hamburg only know Harburg for two reasons: because there is an ICE train station there, where many people have gotten off wrong on the way to the city, and because the 9/11 attackers hid the massacre in the United States have prepared. For core Hamburg residents, on the other hand, the large district south of the Elbe feels like Lower Saxony, and this peripheral location has made it possible for many things to develop less streamlined here than in the center.
Best example: Harburg’s port city. While the well-known Hamburg Hafencity behind the Elbphilharmonie with its polished prospect buildings often seems as serial as the 7000 hectares of container areas in the port, diversity determines the picture in Harburg’s inland port.
Here, crooked half-timbered houses stand next to a black block of flats by the Danish design world stars BIG. The city’s oldest drinking hall, “Kiosk Blohmstraße”, has survived here, as have old harbor cranes, boats and storage facilities. Dirty corners and silver skyscrapers let each other thrive. And in this diverse residential and working city on the water, wall paintings also have a home, which can hardly be found on a house wall in the rest of Hamburg. Curated by the Urban Art Institute in St. Pauli, fire walls were transformed into an open-air gallery in 2017 under the title “Walls Can Dance”, which has been continuously expanded since then.
Spread over a distance of around one kilometer, 13 large-scale works by international street artists can be strolled through. Sometimes large and prominent on arterial roads and in the pedestrian zone, sometimes hidden in a cul-de-sac in a backyard parking lot, this free-for-all painting spreads out the many styles that this form of art in public space has developed: from variants of the 70s to Years of New York graffiti, from house-high portraits of women and garage-sized hedgehogs to enigmatic images about the relationship between man and city or pop versions of Mesoamerican deities.
New frescoes of an urban culture: here is a motif from the Nevercrew open-air gallery.
(Photo: Jerome Gerull/Walls Can Dance)
Here, cloud-skinned whales leap from a stack of tiny houses, a giant boy clad in red half-timbered houses animates a pale backdrop of urban bustle, a titan in a striped shirt sinks his face into the sea next to a cruise ship, or colorful bodies tumble down a house wall.
And unlike before, when such street art was considered vandalism and the artists worked anonymously, they now sign the wall decorations and display them on the project website wallscandance.de her face too.
The creators of the works have long since revealed themselves, like here two members of the Innerfields trio.
(Photo: Jerome Gerull/Urban Art Institute)
One can only wish for a continuation of this “official” mural art in the city center after the tour in Harburg.
How these new frescoes of an urban culture developed from the sign language of the first sprayers as an art form can be experienced from November 2nd in an exhibition in the Museum of Hamburg History. “A city becomes colorful”: a really busy research work on the early days of the Hamburg graffiti scene from 1980 to 1999. What a boy scene chased by the police (girls were the absolute exception) developed in terms of writing, comics and graphic styles, spraying concrete walls, trains and bridges at night has taken longer to gain public acceptance.
In the eyes of a neutral observer, leaving serial ego signs in the city, combined with some posturing, was an adventure whose artistic added value was not always immediately apparent. And anyone who has ever sat in a Wholecar, i.e. an S-Bahn that was completely sprayed over, will have accompanied the dark journey with no view with a few curses. But in its breadth and perseverance, with its connections to hip-hop music and various subcultures, this movement has also developed a force in Hamburg that made artistic advancement possible, which is now more likely to be consensual.
For example, in a district of office buildings that has been badly botched in terms of urban planning, there is now also a very large private museum for street art, Hammerbrooklyn, behind the main train station, in which the long-standing chronicler of the international sprayer scene, Alex Heimkind, pays tribute to the former outsider culture – and also sells it as works on canvas. There are enough places in the city for a safari into the historical and current realms of cheeky mural painting, and exploring them will also get you to know Hamburg from a rather wild side. Because that has remained the same: street art only feels at home where not everything looks the same commercially.