A oversized reproduction of a sign begging for electrical equipment, found in the street in Berlin. Presented in a light box normally used for advertising.

It is a common sight in Berlin to see people, mainly foreigners, holding these signs by the side of roads and close to rubbish tips. The sign I use in this project was found outside a rubbish dump in Prenzlauer Berg and was used to collect broken electrical equipment to be repaired and resold.

The work is essentially a portrait and testimony to this profession. It is possible to imagine the person who wrote the sign by the peculiarities of the hand-writing, to guess at their nationality from the spelling and to judge the recent history of the sign by its dirty surface and battered edges. Like a homeless persons sign begging for food these requests for help are the public face of the people standing behind them. They write, we read and react, or not. Poverty has brought this age-old exchange back to the streets of the city in stark contrast to the accepted face of the new Berlin.

At this scale and in this context the handwritten sign becomes beautiful and finally gets the attention of people, who were they to see the sign in the hands of a foreigner standing in the street, might well have looked away.

Kollwitz Platz is a prosperous area, one where the signs would not usually be found. In showing it so deliberately I want to point out the existence of these people and of the ensuing symbiotic relationship, one living from the waste of the other.