Here at Labour of Love we get sent our fair share of gallery, exhibition, auction and artist press mailers. While we’re overjoyed to see so much going on and so many people inspired and making there’s not a whole lot that grabs us enough we dive of into the links. Every now and again though…

When we spotted one of Tatiana Gulenkina’s series ‘6 hours’ we loved the colours, then on closer inspection the ghosts of the details and on further reading we enjoyed the whole concept. It seems almost too literal - bringing attention to the melting ice; looking for beauty in the temporal and the catastrophic. Often, similar concepts come off as too righteous if abstracted to far and straight up banal if not far enough. These, however, get it right; they lead in with the image and improve with context. But if that’s all just a little ‘art’ then concentrate on the colour and the graduation in the prints. Lovely, right?

 

 

Even better, after a bit of searching we found her site and there’s another series called ‘Things Merging and Falling Apart’. Half of us even prefer it to the ‘6 Hours’ series. Produced in a darkroom, without a camera, using objects directly affecting the paper she’s managed to come up with images that aren’t only delicate and beautiful but that, in places, remind us of the Paradise Garage logo and an old Midlake album cover. In short, we want one, well, actually, 2 of these prints and we’re sure we could find a perfect place for them here at Labour of Love HQ.

 

 

We’re unsure if she has any upcoming shows but we’ll be sure to stick a link up on our Twitter feed if we find some. In the meantime you can buy a limited edition print of the 6 Hours series from the folks over at NinteenSixtyEight to tide you over.

So, we’re not sure what happened but we’ve had a run on the amazing Un Elefante Pollock bars in the past week and they’re now all gone. Boo. But we have reordered and are waiting for the restock in a week or so. Yeah. We still have a couple of the ‘Graffiti’ and ‘Typewriter’ styles left but if you’re the guy that was buying 4 at a time you’ll probably be disappointed as unless you’re first in there won’t be enough to fill your order.

 

 

We love the original hand finished packaging, it was part of the reason they were so wonderful as gifts or a treat to yourself. Every wrapper was slightly different which really set Un Elefante apart. So we’re a bit unsure what to do about their rebrand. The original packaging is shown above. They have switched to a new design, as shown below, but our jury is out on it. We see the point of the viewing window, it was probably needed - even if the sheer unexpected delight of the initial unwrap is now gone. However, the rest is a bit ‘cute graphic’ for our taste. As always, the rest of the world will disagree and they’ll be huge while we spend our time saying ‘we prefered it before; the perfect mix of craft, art and hidden delight’ while everyone that listens thinks ‘idiots’. What can we say, we like our art austere…

 

 

We’ve managed to get our hands on some of the last of the true expressions of their ‘hand crafted, artisan’ intent, so we’ll have them in soon. They’ve stopped making the beautiful original design so we suggest you get in while you can. We’ll need to switch over to the new, and don’t get us wrong, still beautiful Un Elefante bars next time but for now don’t hang around if you’re thinking of getting some as gifts to others or yourself.

 

We’ll send out a mail when the new stock arrives.

So, we visited Berlin and fell in love. Had we visited a good few years ago we’d never have come back. Really, it’s that inspiring. It’s a glimpse into what London could have and should have been had it not privatised it’s soul and capitulated to hyper-capitalism. It pulses with the energy that the East End briefly had in the late 90’s and early 2000s. It’s liveable, open, diverse, green and egalitarian. In short, if you’ve too many ties you should visit and if not you should move.

 

 

We spent a long time walking and cycling (you can hire bikes from almost every street corner) over the 4 days we were there and read a lot of guides. Ideally we just wanted to export our google map with the recommended places on it for you to visit but for some reason Google has made that impossible. So, instead we’ve made an edited list of places worth your time with a super succinct explanation. Click the place name to get a google map (you can save it on your map, should you wish, or link through to the venue site). We saved almost 50 destinations and could have saved double if we’d noted all the interesting places we saw and visited. This lot should get you started, we’ve omitted most of the more obvious big tourist spots as we figured, as adventurous sorts, you’d prefer something a little different.

 

Art:

St Agnes

Jaw dropping interior, mundane exterior, super exhibitions. #fuckyeabrutalism

Sammlung Boros

Incredible building, incredible collection, make sure you book a slot in advance on the site

Jüdische Mädchenschule

3 Galleries, beautiful building, great restaurants, weight of history palpable.

 

Shops:

10119 Design

Small but perfectly formed. Looks great, smells great, you’ll want it all from the books to the art to the homewares.

Do You Read Me?

Great selection of mostly magazines and some books. Hand luggage only? Beware.

ANDREAS MURKUDIS

Heavy hitting strain of the concept store. Refined edit of beautiful objects and clothing from Celine level brands.

DSTM

Is it underwear or outerwear? Who cares. It’s mostly black, mostly beautiful and their photography has humour and style.

Super Store

Almost Scandi in it’s edit and warmth of design. A little more (design literate) homely than most.

 

Eating:

Ora

Located in an old apothecary with most of the fittings still in place. A refined take on german food, good for lunch.

Cookies Cream

Hard to find, easy to love modern vegetarian temple.

Cafe V

Being vegetarian or vegan is easy in Berlin, this cheap, easy going veggie cafe is worth a visit.

Schwarzwaldstuben

Cheap, friendly, well made german dishes.

Tulus Lotrek

Super refined cooking, mad cocktails, lovely intimate space with terrace. Isn’t cheap; is fantastic.

 

Drinking:

Tadshikische Teestube

Beautiful, colourful tearoom. Drop by for tea late afternoon when it’s quiet for a meditative break.

Schwarze Traube

Knock and smile to get in. 3 cocktails on the list per day, just ask for whatever he recommends.

Klunkerkranich

It’s Franks Bar. In Berlin. But Cheaper.

Hopfenreich

Good craft beer, good atmosphere, interesting neighbourhood.

Larry

Small, easygoing, check who’s DJing, worth checking out, they even dance in here.

Mysliwska

Very Berlin, very ramshackle, very cool, good for a late drink

John Muir

Good cocktails, no idea why it seems to be named after a Scotsman.

Salon zur wilden Renate

Big, rambling, artfully dishevelled fun house / club.

 

Throw in great flea markets, good cycle lanes, mental clubs, friendly people and the fact that no one seems interested in creating anything vaguely glitzy or ‘exclusive’ and you would seem to have the perfect modern city. Long may it continue.

 

 

 

 

The Peckham reboot powers on with a new mini festival across many of its independent venues. It’s electronica rooted and has a nice mix of the bigger hitters and the local crews. From Juan Atkins, who is probably by now the great-grandfather of the scene, to the younger underground names like Kassim Mosse right down to the local and eclectic West Norwood Cassette Library. It’s running across the whole weekend from Friday the 13th to Sunday the 15th of May.

All the local venues you’d expect are involved; The Bussey, Canavans, Peckham Springs as well as small music orientated spaces like The Gowlett. It’s good to see events like this that are set up and run by local businesses as opposed to large branded events that feel like they’re air dropped in ’cause the Sprite marketing department has heard Peckham is ‘cool’. They’re also running some music production sessions so if you fancy tightening up those snare sounds or exploring a few more options in your Ableton then you should probably get down and meet like minds at the same time.

You can get tickets through the website here. Go on, it’s like the disco equivalent of a local farmer’s market.