The Shared Creative Process with Rocco and His Brother's

The advantages of anonymity are obvious: freedom, projection, mythology. Attention shifts away from individuals and more toward the work itself…or at least the idea of it. Names, biographies and faces often function like little cushions between artwork and audience. Anonymity removes some of that upholstery.

 

At the same time, it creates a strange paradox. The less visible you become, the more people try to construct an image of you. Absence produces narrative. Especially in a culture obsessed with visibility, self-disclosure and personal branding. The disadvantages are equally obvious. You sacrifice comfort, authorship, sometimes even historical clarity. The art world still prefers things it can catalogue properly, invite to dinners and photograph next to collectors.

 

For us, anonymity never emerged as a romantic artistic gesture. It came naturally from the environments we grew up in. In graffiti and other underground structures - where many practices permanently operate within grey zones of permission, legality and control - hiding your identity is simply part of the grammar. You learn early that the work often travels further than the person behind it. And maybe that still interests us most: the possibility of becoming culturally present while remaining physically absent. Like a rumour. A ghost in the infrastructure.

 

 

The alter ego emerges almost automatically in graffiti. The moment you start writing an invented name across the city, a strange double exposure begins between person and fiction. That name quickly develops a life of its own. It moves through spaces, appears in places where the actual person was never physically present.

 

People talk about it, hate it, celebrate it, invent stories around it. At a certain point the alter ego starts having a social life of its own while the real person mostly carries backpacks and sleep deprivation. The alter ego becomes both mask and infrastructure at the same time.

 

The separation between person and persona eventually becomes almost natural. The alter ego absorbs projection, risk and mythology while the individual behind it remains partially withdrawn. In underground culture, identity is often built through traces and repetition rather than self-explanation. You are not building a brand in the conventional sense, but more like an echo moving through urban space. And of course there is a certain freedom in that. The alter ego is allowed to be more irrational, exaggerated, humorous or destructive than the person behind it. It becomes a kind of interface between inner impulse and public projection. Maybe that is why graffiti still remains one of the purest forms of cultural self-creation: you

do not wait to be seen. You inscribe yourself directly into the perception of others.

 

The biggest challenge is probably that the gallery space immediately domesticates many works. The moment something receives white walls, proper lighting and a price tag, its temperature changes automatically. Works that originally emerged from friction, risk or surprise suddenly run the danger of feeling like relics of those conditions instead. Almost like taxidermied animals from a once-living moment.

 

At the same time, that tension is exactly what interests us. The attempt to move something into an institutional context that was never originally intended for institutions. How much resistance survives? What disappears? What suddenly becomes more visible?

 

Public space forces work into direct confrontation. Nobody agreed to it, nobody bought a ticket, nobody was invited. Inside an exhibition space, there is already an underlying consensus: people came there expecting art. That changes the energy fundamentally. Which is why we are less interested in transporting street-art objects into galleries than in carrying over the tensions, atmospheres and social mechanics from which they originally emerged. The work should not become entirely comfortable just because it is suddenly standing on polished floors.

 

We are interested in the collision between extreme short-livedness and the almost absurd human desire for permanence. Internet culture produces images, memes, hypes and entire aesthetics at a speed where things are often already dead before they are even fully understood.

 

Traditional craftsmanship slows images down. And by doing that alone, it fundamentally changes their meaning. Digital culture is optimised for speed: consume, scroll, forget. Craftsmanship introduces resistance, labour and physical time. Someone spends days, weeks or months producing something that online might receive only two seconds of attention before disappearing between crypto scams, skincare ads and societal collapse.

 

That shift automatically creates a strange form of amplification. A meme rendered as stone mosaic, hand carving or elaborate sculpture suddenly acquires physical gravity. The same imagery that normally dissolves somewhere between cat videos and doomscrolling suddenly starts behaving like cultural heritage.

 

We are also interested in the cultural reversal embedded in that process. Historically, many traditional techniques were reserved for religion, political power or historical memory. Today they preserve internet fragments, subcultural codes and digital absurdities. Which feels both ridiculous and strangely accurate at the same time. Maybe that is exactly where dogma begins: the moment people forget that almost every system surrounding them was once invented by other people.

 

Dogma becomes most interesting to us once it turns invisible. The moment rules, systems of control or structures of authority stop appearing as political decisions and begin to feel like natural laws. As if God himself had personally decided that this exact fence absolutely had to stand here forever.

 

Modern systems of security and order operate precisely through that mechanism. Cameras, barriers, surveillance, restrictions, police presence- through constant repetition, all of it slowly starts feeling normal. What is actually constructed power successfully disguises itself as inevitable reality.

 

Our works try to introduce small disturbances into that apparent normality. Situations where it suddenly becomes visible that concepts like order, ownership or security are not laws of nature, but agreements. Often fairly questionable ones. That is also where we still feel closely connected to graffiti and other subcultural practices. They refuse to accept the city as a finished product and instead treat it as something that can constantly be appropriated, reinterpreted or overwritten. Every intervention becomes a small rejection of the idea that the existing order is somehow without alternatives.

 

And maybe that is exactly where dogma begins: the moment people forget that almost every system surrounding them was once invented by other people - most of whom were probably also just improvising while pretending to know what they were doing.

 

 

Out of courtesy. If you spend years observing each other, you might as well make it official.

 

Berlin. We grew up there. Probably know nothing better than its underground systems,

frictions and strange social choreographies. Less polite, more alive.

 

Of course. The moment a face gets attached to the work, perception changes

automatically. People love biographies. Sometimes more than the work itself.

 

The night belongs to possibility. The day to documentation.

 

Unfortunately archive everything. Otherwise the city administration eventually wins.

 

Controlled chaos. Like every good operation.

 

No. But it has become extremely good at selling its aesthetics.