BUS126 - Enemy Kids

Graffiti legend, artist and author BUS 126 has been surprising us for decades with ever new forms, techniques and locations for his pictures. In caves, in forests and on city facades, he creates a work that consists of three letters and a number, BUS 126, and reaches far beyond graffiti, extending like a root into the most diverse areas of artistic expression.

The original version of ENEMY KIDS was created back in 1997 as a reaction to ODEM's “On the Run”, the first German-language work of so-called “graffiti literature”, which is above all a controversial piece of coming-of-age prose. In this book, two chapters are dedicated to BUS 126, in which he finds it difficult to find himself. Inspired by the text, which was noticeably formulated by a ghostwriter, he recounts his own view of the West Berlin graffiti scene, his childhood and youth in Lichtenrade and Marienfelde. Were these beginnings of hip hop and graffiti in Berlin really so glorious and creative? Who were the young men whose lives included graffiti as much as violence and boredom? What was the atmosphere like in the walled-in half of the city?

Finally completed after 25 years, ENEMY KIDS seems like a journey through time, in a city whose places and street names are familiar to us, but which is nevertheless a completely different world. Completely devoid of name-dropping and glorification, BUS 126 tells of a time without cell phones 

and the Internet, without video surveillance and graffiti gates. A time when knives were as common in certain circles as markers, fights were as commonplace as surfing the subway and love was as far away as any prospect of ever getting out of it all.

Praise:

West Berlin at the end of the 80s, the Wall still standing. A pale, thin teenager now calls himself Bus126, walks upright and expansively: does marching, although he wanders, no, he flies.
At home, leaden silence is interrupted by rattling slaps. Outside, nights usually end in bloody horror. As a witness, as a victim, as a perpetrator. A young soul scratched by roaming thorn bushes and discolored by the witnessed evil of its own environment. No support anywhere. Bus126 presents a coming-of-age text that describes the search for action and personality in a milieu of coldness and indifference in all its ruthlessness.

SADE, BMQ REZ

104 pages
Soft cover