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Made of Desires and Fears

Drew.Lab_One
Photo © Nika Kramer

Made of Desires and Fears, 2024

Acrylic and spray paint

Photo © Nika Kramer

The Italian street artist Drew.Lab_One lives in Berlin and has always been fascinated by calligraphy. Spurred on by this interest, she developed her very own letter style, her own form of “calligraffiti.” Drew.Lab_One’s complex and dynamic letter structures combine several traditions: those of Arabic, Italian, and Sumerian calligraphy, as well as Cyrillic and Gothic script traditions. The artfully handwritten word appears in her work as a calligraphic mantra.

“Words create a reality.”

Drew.Lab_One’s work shown here plays with the ambiguity of the English word “letter,” which means both “correspondence” and “letter of the alphabet.” The artist created a collage of quotations from the Italian author Italo Calvino using different letter types from different eras and cultures, which symbolize the architectural and cultural diversity of Berlin. For Drew.Lab_One, cities are not stable entities, but a resonance of many voices – the sum of the longings and fears of their inhabitants. In this work, visitors become part of this complex of voices and emotions as they are temporarily reflected in letters written in mirror paint.

Commissioned work

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Text sources for the artwork

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Turin 1972.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” 

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Turin 1972.

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” 

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Turin 1972.

“Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”  

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 2004.