Uli Happe is an artist and filmmaker. Since the 1980s and 90s, he has been documenting Berlin’s subcultural and urban transformation.
Uli captures a very particular moment in time: artist groups like the Mutoid Waste Company, Brits who fled Thatcher’s England, welding scrap metal into hydraulic monsters at Görlitzer Bahnhof. Uli is right in the middle of this Mad Max style performance, camera on his shoulder, amid flying, burning metal.
Then the Tacheles. Evictions. Police hands pushing in front of the lens. An Alexanderplatz that doesn’t yet know it will one day be redeveloped. And on Sundays at six in the morning, he drives through the empty city with his camera mounted on the car roof. No people, no cars, just Berlin.
Few people understood back then what he was doing. He was recording the city as it was: a vast video archive of post-reunification Berlin, one of the very few documents of that era still in existence. At the time, none of it was history yet. Things usually only become history when it’s too late, because nobody had the camera running. Uli did.
You weren’t there? Doesn’t matter. He was.
