BORN TO DIE IN BERLIN

Berlin is a story written with needles on the skin; it is flesh pierced by suffering, healed scars left by History, graffiti made on a wall that could not fall. But that then fell, releasing a river of creative energy that could no longer be contained. Berlin reunified after November 9, 1989, offered huge, post-industrial, abandoned spaces that, as it has always been, found in artists those who can imagine those places, useless for the rest of society, as infinite possibilities. It is in these places, unique and fantastic, that the incredible, and perhaps unrepeatable, season of the club culture in Berlin. In this fertile ground, many forms of art have developed, including the most extreme ones, that art made with 'the skin of the artist himself', which hardly find recognition in the official artistic spaces. As for electronic music, Berlin clubs have been the incubator for several generations of musicians who have found an ideal and protected environment here. But, as always happens and as has happened in other metropolises such as London or New York, these avant-gardes of artists who, like gardeners in a desert, gave birth to flowers and plants where there was only sand, are faced with an enemy called gentrification. This term means 'to make elegant, to ennoble', or to 'redevelop' entire neighborhoods or areas of a city, previously recovered and made habitable by the artists, making them become chic And exponentially raising house prices. This results in the replacement of old residents (of popular strata) with new residents (belonging to the band of the new rich). This real 'bourgeoising' of culturally lively areas, brings big gains for a few but, in Berlin it is destroying that social fabric, formed by clubs, which alone is worth about two billion euros and employs thousands of people. But for every club forced to close, not only a certain number of jobs vanish, to be completely lost, that specific and unique identity of the city that, from the fall of the Wall onwards, had returned to be, as in other eras of its history, the vital center of European art and creativity. A city for sale to which perhaps there is nothing left to do but sew its lips to make its cry louder.