Mentalgassi

Berlin is like the Pandora’s box of street art and urban interventions. If you look inside you can see endless different realities. Between these, Mentalgassi is one of the most noteworthy: it’s an anonymous collective who tries to give an identity to city public spaces. One of their most common actions consist in pasting oversized pictures of funny expressive faces, covering street furniture from ticket-validating machines to water tanks or recycling bins.

“Mentalgassi create street art to open your eyes…” says one of their slogan. Thanks to their installations people notice, maybe for the first time, the often invisible city furniture that anonimously surrounds us everyday.

Another project, less known than the first one but indeed interesting, is called Public Intimacy: their aim is to recreate the typical home atmosphere in the middle of a street, switching a phone box to a shower or a metro station into a comfortable living room with curtains and carpet. This work is a major break in the sameness of urban context, surely noteworthy in the contemporary street intervention panorama.