Advertisements are being kidnapped in Germany

VISUAL KIDNAPPINGS
Adbusting in Berlin
Large advertisments are no longer safe in Berlin. Models and consumer products are being "kidnapped" -- that is completely cut out of posters and billboards. Those responsible say their aim is to reappropriate commercialized public space.
By Christian Fuchs

She was six meters tall, slim and looked pretty enticing. Large beads of water ran down her body and onto her black outfit. The slogan next to her invited passers-by to "snatch the offer with zero waiting." But the Coca-Cola company probably wasn't expecting anyone to take this rhetorical question literally.

The giant ad with the oversized "Coke Zero" bottle had only been put up in Berlin a few days earlier, following the soft drink giant's launch of its new product in July, but the beverage was soon missing from the poster. Instead, passers-by now saw exactly what the brand name promised -- zero.

Unknown activists had climbed up the scaffolding in front of Berlin's University of the Arts and cut out the oversized bottle. Around four in the morning, film student Sahand Zamani happened to see the bottle "lying on the ground, neatly cut out." He says several people were climbing around on the scaffolding that the ad was attached to. People at Coca-Cola think this "charming theft" isn't such a terrible thing. Company spokeswoman Claudia Fasse even says she's happy "that Coke Zero is so popular with students they'll even go out and steal it." That's why the corporation decided not to remove the damaged poster. Replacing it would have cost no less than €10,000 ($12,767). Besides, the vandalized poster is still "aesthetically pleasing" and the ad's concept still works, Fasse says.

Ever since the Coke bottle was stolen, no advertising poster in Berlin is safe any longer. The so-called "visual kidnappers" struck again repeatedly in the following days. Their next victim was Gravis, Apple Computer's German distributor. The kidnappers cut life-size red and violet models and computer products out of an ad put up near a construction site. What remained were round holes and the shadows of dancing people. "Whoever did that isn't quite right in the head," Gravis spokeswoman Nora Prautsch says she thought at first. Like the Coca-Cola poster, the €3,500 ($4,466) ad was up for only four days before it was artistically reworked by vandals.

Now the company is trying to handle the situation "in a humorous and creative way," Prautsch says. She's started a contest: The images of the missing models can be accessed on the Internet and printed out. Whoever photographs them in the most original setting wins an iPod. Prautsch takes the so-called "cut-outs" in stride. "It seems to be a new trend," she says. "It's no use getting upset about it."

No ad is safe

But electronics maker Samsung isn't quite so relaxed about what is happening. The South Korean firm had the entire Charlottenburg Gate on Berlin's main boulevard covered up in fabric ads featured a new mobile phone. Here too the models -- male, in this case -- were abducted from the poster. You can almost see them leaping energetically out of the ad. The entire wrapping of the gate cost the company between €150,000 and €200,000, according to Samsung's spokesman Hong Lim. Such sums are no laughing matter for the electronics giant: The unknown activists were charged with wilful damage to property and the ad was quickly fixed up.

But the companies and the Berlin police are clueless as to who could be behind the adbusting. "It's a new trend, and just a marginal one," says Marko Moritz, a member of the Berlin police department that deals with graffiti. He adds that "overall," the calculated defacement of ads is "not relevant at all."

But the "visual kidnappings" that took place in early August are not the first to have occurred in Berlin. At 5:37 a.m. on April 2, 2002, the Parisian artist Zevs kidnapped a 10-meter (33-feet) model advertising Lavazza coffee from one of Berlin's main squares, Alexanderplatz. To be sure, the ad slogan "Express yourself!" was asking for trouble. Within a few hours, Zevs had cut the lady from the ad and left a note: "Visual Kidnapping -- Pay now." Zevs then issued a written statement demanding a €500,000 ($638,694) ransom. Just to make it clear he wasn't fooling around, he severed one of the model's fingers and mailed it to the company headquarters in Turin. Before the police could catch him, he escaped to Sweden.

From then on, Zevs toured the art galleries of Europe with a documentary film about his "kidnapping" and the kidnapped model itself, rolled up for convenient transportation. Two years ago, he asked visitors of Berlin's New Society for the Visual Arts ( Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst ) to take a vote about whether the model should be "executed." Last year, he finally returned her to the Lavazza company, following a sham ransom payment. Zevs is on a mission. By bringing about the visual abduction of his victims, he wants to draw attention to the way "public space is oversaturated with and dominated by commercial imagery," as curator Anke Ulrich writes in the catalog that accompanies NGBK's exhibition of Zevs's work.

Reclaiming the city

Zevs' openly declared goal is to reclaim the city. Graffitti culture already gave French philosopher Jean Baudrillard occasion to ruminate on the "revolution of the signs" and the reappropriation of public space in 1978. But now that the advertising industry actively recruits graffiti artists and uses them for its own purposes -- as when it advertises new records or soft drinks like Zero Coke by having their names and logos stencilled on city sidewalks. So now street artists have started looking for virgin territory.

Perhaps it was unavoidable that "guerrilla marketing" would be met with an even more extreme response from urban artists. The French "Anti-Advertizing Commando" movement recently scrawled "Shut Up" on posters in Paris and various provincial towns. Single letters stuck on ad slogans to change their meaning are another device popular with groups such as "Résistance à l'aggression publicitaire" ("Resistance Against Advertising Violence") and "Stopub" ("Stop Ads") -- a device they use in their "holy war against consumer society and the terror of brands," as the German conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has reported.

No one has claimed responsibility for the adbusting in Berlin so far. But it's clear that Germans are also acting up against encroaching ads. In Bremen, for example, the eyes and mouths of models were cut out of fashion ads. In August 2005, a giant poster paid for by the cell phone company Base and displayed on Alexanderplatz was slashed up. It was filling the entire view of local residents with its slogan: "That's True Freedom of Speech." The website indymedia.org featured a comment in which a tenant calling himself "Gauner" (Crook) complained that "you can't just ignore that kind of oversize mug -- it fills your whole window." He also raised the provocative question of whether "personal freedom takes priority over a large corporation's right to aggressive advertising." A group that calls itself "Base in Ya Face" answered the question with "Operation Slitface." The group sliced the 10 meter face of the model right out of the ad.

In August 2006, Swiss fashion label Tally Weijl also fell prey to the critics of growing consumerism. Activists targeted two giant posters showing a model in skimpy underwear snuggling in the lap of a pink rabbit. "The perpetrators cut holes the size of a hand out of the heads of the figures, splashed blood-red paint over them and drew a penis on the model's groin," Tally Weijl's spokesman Christian Handelsman says.

No less than two groups had gotten to work on the posters --independently of each other. The so-called "Love Gang," which consists of Berlin-based artists Spair and Fiona, sprayed the words "Love Gang" on the company logo and added a phallus to the model's panties. Several hours later, a different activist sliced holes into the canvas and bordered them with red paint so they resembled gunshot wounds. Spair was "pretty disappointed at how insensitive the second guy treated the already modified poster," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

The urban art community is buzzing with speculation that an artist known by the name of Klotz is responsible for the Zevs-style activism over the past few weeks. Meanwhile, film student Zamani thinks the cut-out models will possibly reappear collectively one day: "I can imagine a collage of all the figures as an art event or a form of guerrilla marketing."