Although many friends and strangers came by to contribute to the wall, unfortunately, at the end of the day, the wall had to be taken down, and during the process many works became broken or damaged.

We also had the chance to create a Lambe Lambe workshop in the MitDir Music Festival in Brandenburg, Germany, 2023, where our crowd was festival visitors. It was a cozy and calm corner where people could take a rest from the festival ambiance, take a seat, paint or write, and let their “finished” or “unfinished” works join the growing collage on the wall.

The last workshop took place in a Berlin Art Spring event in the Bornholmer II Kleingartenanlage community gardens in Berlin, Germany. This event was frequented by more children than adults, and was largely a community event for the people in the gardens.

Lambe Lambe

Social sculpture project, street poster occupation workshops with Anne Bolena

What is a Social Sculpture?

We call the Lambe Lambe project a social sculpture because not only do we work together with spatial and sculptural elements (the environments in which Lambe Lambe happen), but also because we bring people together to express themselves, and to mark their presence in the public space.

Oftentimes in Berlin, as migrants, as POCs, and as people for whom public space is not readily accessible (because of ableism, racism, queerphobia, you name it), it is an act of resistance to show our presence, our thoughts, and to let them stay in public space.

The first iteration was a guerilla poster occupation workshop in Panke river, Berlin, Germany, in the summer of 2021.

We invited participants to “cross the river” as a symbolic performative act to conquer their fears, and paste their work of self-expression on the wall adjoining the river. If they could not cross the river themselves, they were welcome to ask someone else to carry their artwork over and paste it for them.

As the glue is made of tapioca powder and warm water, it is therefore non-toxic to the river.

Besides the glue, we also provided paper, paints, brushes, and picnic mats for people to spontaneously make posters. We were also greatly helped by our friends.

The second iteration of Lambe Lambe took place in the Weissensee Art Academy Berlin during the yearly Open Doors. We desired to use the Lambe Lambe space to amplify voices that were otherwise normally forgotten by the university social spheres, because of racism or classism.

Unfortunately, we were not given a wall at the Rundgang (Open Doors), and instead we used a back wall outside of the university grounds, and we had to cover the whole thing with plastic sticky sheets before we could create the installation.

Lambe Lambe was a social sculpture, a self-empowerment project for people who felt voiceless in a rapidly changing cosmopolitan city. It ws a series of spontaneous street poster occupations where people came together to express themselves through poster-making, and to paste them on the wall spontaneously to create a poster mural. This project was a collaboration created together with Anne Bolena Nascimento from 2019 to 2023.

“Lambe” in Brazilian-Portuguese means “to lick” and “Lambe turah” in Javanese means literally “to spill the mouth” (or to speak without filter about someone).