http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,763843,00.htmlIn the North Rhine-Westphalian town of Velbert, a weeping willow looks much cheerier than its name suggests. It's wearing a rainbow sweater. Rings of multi-colored yarn hug the trunk, giving it the look of a giant package of plush Lifesavers. The vibrant tree is the work of Ute Lennartz-Lembeck, one among the world's growing ranks of knitting guerrillas and founder of the German knitting graffiti group B-Arbeiten. The 50-year-old art teacher took up the hobby, also known as "yarnbombing" and "yarnstorming," after seeing the work of others on a visit to Berlin.
Graffiti knitters typically install their stitched creations on signposts, statues, bicycles and any other surface that can serve as a creative display space. And just like graffiti of a more permanent kind, their work can be politically-motivated, whimsical, witty or inane. Lennartz-Lembeck was so inspired by the cozy urban art she saw in Berlin that she decided to import the concept from the capital to her hometown of Remscheid and beyond -- but her projects incorporate language too.
"It's about words and art, putting art in an open space and not necessarily a museum," she says of B-Arbeiten's work. The group, whose name is a play on the German word "bearbeiten," which means to edit or alter, revises city streets with their colourful creations in hopes of getting passers-by to reconsider their surroundings.
Armed with her knitting needles, Lennartz-Lembeck aims to return significance to words representing values that "we are all familiar with but that have become little more than meaningless shells." The German word for courage, "Mut," is stitched on one of her signs. On the sidewalks of Cologne, pedestrians are confronted with the word "Idee" (idea) hanging on a lamppost. "Raum" (space) reads another sign, hanging on a pole by a deserted lake.
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