B EAST Magazine website

By Joel Alas

On a narrow street in Budapest’s vibrant Jewish Quarter, a new design shop offers a glimpse beneath the city’s cultural radar. It invites local street artists to display their designs on the wall, then echoes the motifs across clothing and furniture. Called Printa, the shop is a mix of gallery, café, boutique and screen printing workshop.

A palate of black and white dominates the store. It’s a start-yet-effective colour scheme that allows the art and products to stand out. The clothing range, too, is primarily a two-tone selection, and it works perfectly for the style of design favoured by artists here.

From the clothing racks hang edgy t-shirts, dresses, scarves and even aprons, while around the shop are second-hand furniture items, re-upholstered with smartly printed fabrics. There’s lots of textile recycling going on here: bicycle tubes turned into bags and purses, old washing machine drums revived as cushion-covered foot stools.

Printa opened in November 2009, offering an outlet for Budapest’s dynamic street artists. The city hosts a number of talented designers who began in the medium of graffiti, and have moved toward paper, canvas and sketchbook work. Printa’s founder is Claudia Martins, a Brazilian photographer disillusioned with her medium, who turned to screen printing as a new outlet.

“I always question: Do we need so many images? In photography we are overexposing the world,” Martins says over a café latte in Printa’s coffee corner. “Screen printing is pretty much the same technique as photography. Print shows the internal processes of each person. I’m totally in love with screen printing.”

The engine of the store is the printing workshop at the rear, with a rotating screen printing tree, rinsing basins, work benches, and shelves of old screens in their wooden frames. Here artists create their designs, then copy them by hand onto t-shirts and other fabrics.

There’s a small gallery space at the front of the shop where the designs are displayed in their original form – on paper or canvas, hung on the wall. The same patterns can be seen throughout the shop. As well as walking away with a canvas, you can take the design on a limited-run t-shirt.

Looking out onto the street is a small café area with an adjoining shelf of locally produced art books, plus editions from the ubiquitous Taschen design library and an obligatory Tom of Finland hardcover.

You’ll find Printa at Rumbach Sebestyen utca 10, almost directly opposite the ornately-decorated Status Quo synagogue.

Nearby, in the busy shopping district around the Vorosmarty Square, another creative clothing concept is taking shape. A group of young fashion design students have renovated a cheap apartment space overlooking the busy square, and have transformed it into an atelier and private clothing showroom. Called Kepp, the space is another example of initiative projected by the young creatives of Budapest.

A rack of fashion samples greets the visitor as they enter the small apartment, with designs ranging from simple to experimental. The designers here are all still studying at the local art university, and their ideas about material, texture and shape are fresh and exciting.

Kepp is a private showroom, so you’ll have to arrange a visit. E-mail info(a)keppshowroom.com to make an appointment.

Printa
www.printa.hu
Rumbach Sebestyen utca 10, Budapest VII

Kepp Showroom
www.keppshowroom.com
Vorosmarty ter 3

By Joel Alas

Once upon a time, there stood a castle in the center of Berlin. A huge and hulking Baroque monolith, it was built by the Prussian kings to display their power and wealth. But the castle wasn’t powerful enough to survive World War II. It was damaged by bombing, and was later destroyed entirely by the occupying Soviets.

In the 1970s the DDR built the headquarters for its government, the Palast Der Republik, on the same site. But after German reunification, it too was destroyed under the guise of asbestos concerns (though many believe the building’s removal was a symbolic act against the former Soviet East German state).

Now it sits empty. A beautiful green park with boardwalks reaching down to the River Spree has been installed there, enjoyed all summer long by tourists and locals alike.

Over the past decade, a group of powerful and rich (mostly) west Germans have lobbied the government to reconstruct the old Prussian castle (known as the Stadtschloss) on the site. With their good ties with the ruling political parties, they were able to persuade parliament to agree to the plan. The project was budgeted at over half a billion euros, although the cost is expected to skyrocket beyond that. An architectural competition was called, and a boring design by an Italian architect was selected.

Over the past few months, the wheels have been falling off the project. The architectural competition was found to be improperly conducted, and a financial crisis has drained the treasury. Berliners are slowly waking up to the realization that the idea of building a fake castle was stupid to begin with, and makes even less sense in the current economic climate.

Today B EAST magazine announces the first public demonstration against the Stadtschloss. Called “Schloss Mit Lustig! Cancel The Castle!”, the demonstration will take place on Saturday October 17 at 15.00 on the site of the proposed castle. A jumping castle will be on site, and participants are requested to come dressed as royalty to help ridicule this indefensible waste of money.

Later that night, B EAST will host an afterparty for the demonstration at Betahaus in Kreuzberg called “The Only Good Castle is a Jumping Castle.” Our favourite DJs Shameless Limitless will spin some electro-techno-laptoprock, and Linards the Latvian DJ, formerly of Riga’s Space:Garage, will provide visuals.

Get all the details at www.stopstadtschloss.com

Over a year ago, we told you about Iraq’s abandoned embassy in East Berlin. The embassy was deserted by Iraqi diplomats shortly after the fall of the wall, and was promptly forgotten.

We at B EAST decided it was time the deteriorating building was handed back to the public. One sunny weekend in August, we – along with our Berlin friends (the Shameless Limitless DJ team, plus the Berlin Loves You t-shirt crew) – took over the embassy, armed with a generator and a sound system.

Here’s two videos that show what went down:

“The green Zone” from Knut Knutson on Vimeo.