Photo by Ibra Wane.
This weekend, an unconventional and progressive creative collaboration will be unfolding at the EQ-House in Tempelhofer Feld between Tape That and Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team, a collaboration that explores the creative potential of tape art. Tape Art? Now that’s pretty unorthodox. After all, a roll of tape is something anyone can get their hands on. Thus enter Tape That, a Berlin collective establishing this little known but burgeoning art.
SLEEK: A key objective of yours is to establish tape art as an art form. What exactly are you doing to help make that happen?
TAPE THAT: Wow, great question! Our main priority is to raise awareness of tape art. Since we were founded in 2011, a lot has happened, in Berlin especially. We’ve run workshops and exhibitions in over 30 countries, but tape art is more widespread in Germany than virtually anywhere else. Berlin is definitely the tape art capital, but we want to roll tape art out across the globe. The more people get to know it, try it and love it, the more accessible it will be. Tape as a medium feels so different from paint. The scope it offers is amazing. We’ve seen in our workshops how incredibly free people are during the creative process. As platforms, our workshops reflect our efforts to make tape art more widespread and accessible to more and more people.
S: And what about your first personal experience with tape?
TT: I came across this New York artist who used neon coloured tape. That really caught my imagination, and I went out to find some neon-coloured tape of my own. I was dying to try it out. There was a shop in Kreuzberg, in Berlin, called Klebeband, where you could buy it and they really sold it to you as an art material rather than as something technical. That shop soon became the hub of the Berlin taping scene.
S: What happened next?
TT: Since 2015 we’ve been establishing an active scene around tape art. We contacted everyone we knew and all the most interesting artists and invited them to take part in a show in Berlin. That’s how the Tape Art Convention 2016 came about. We had literally zero budget and all the artists came to Berlin at their own expense just to be here. In 2018, even more came, and we’re now working on an international scene that’s shaping the perception of tape art as art. More recently, just last weekend we hosted the 2022 Tape Art Convention.
Photo by Ibra Wane.
S: I’m sensing this is about an entire attitude you want to reflect.
TT: Totally. Definitely. Tape art as an art form is still quite new, and the attitude that goes with it is evolving. To us, it incorporates the idea that you can be creative with whatever material is around you. We’re driven by the idea that anyone anywhere in the world can just pick up a roll of tape and make art with it. Tape art causes no damage and no harm – and that’s really important to us. In the nineties, there was a tape art collective in New York who already wanted to create street art without breaking the law. They came up with works in public spaces that could be removed without a problem. So there’s a history of individual stories like that in different places around the world. As far as the scene today is concerned, its roots can be traced back here, to Berlin.
S: This weekend May 14 and May 15 you’ll be taking part in an exciting and progressive creative collaboration with the Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team at Tempelhofer Feld. What attracted you to the task of taping a car?
TT: We love the unconventional, be it that we focus on working with tapes and adhesives to create our artworks or turning a Formula E race car into an artwork. There is always challenges connected to tapping in the unconventional which makes the artwork special and unique to us.
Photo by Ibra Wane.
S: What inspires you to implement collaborations of this kind?
In this case it was the unusual canvas. While we often also work on plain walls, a super highly functional object like a race car is something completely different. It has lots of unusual shapes and can be really tricky at times – but also very inspiring!
S: How will you go about it? Can you describe the process?
TT: The plan was to combine two styles that are clearly distinguishable but do not work against each other. We ended up with a black and white pattern consisting of hatched spaces that are connected to each other and a somewhat wilder tape style that incorporated blueish colors.
S: Is there a message behind your idea?
TT: While the black and white areas more or less follow a rule of hatching, the colored areas are born by intuition. It is this combination of sticking to rules or following your intuition that we find fascinating.
Join the Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team and Tape That on Saturday May 14 and Sunday May 15 at EQ-House Tempelhofer Feld to experience the world of tape art.
All Photos by Ibra Wane.