Four months spent on building-site 'Goa' (touristic bar-restaurant in Berlin Mitte, opposite art-house Tacheles) bullying and caressing walls, old and new, into life. Given a good deal of freedom to experiment with whatever sprang to mind, including gold leaf for the ceilings. Fun with stucco and bar surfaces too (picture below). Much of it messy work - carried out under the disjointed noses of Profi painters doing the real work. When allocated to help me directly they would mumble and throw silent, disgusted glances around the place. But they always came around in the end. Any respect earned from these guys was based on something seen, i.e., right at the end of a job, not just imagined or explained. An area was treated with pigments and lime, plastered over, later to be sanded and hacked away again to reveal previous 'layers'. Oiling and waxing last of all added depth and left the walls coldly sensuous to the touch. The work I can still be proud of, but the episode was peppered with problems.
Introduced here to cocaine (the experiments didn't only happen on the walls) stress became a significant factor. How to create it from nothing, how to pretend to control it, how to enjoy it - for a short while. By such means were the more valuable workers expertly manipulated by the money-men to perform well. Thus driven to produce a smash hit restaurant, the backdrop was one of daily intrigue, bickering and meetings with salivating reps and local mafia. All this was part of the kick, as far as I could ever tell, at the top end of creative gastronomy. As usual the key players were attractive, cynical and sordidly flamboyant. Whilst downstairs drunkenness, injury and a breakdown rubbed salt into the calluses of the Polish builders. Slaving all hours to earn, for them, a reasonable wage (German peanuts), these sad alcoholics were separated from family for many months at a time in self-inflicted exile. Sleeping like criminals in the cellar, afraid to step out to buy kebabs and a six-pack, the 'black workers' of eastern Europe (and plenty of other places too) are the people who built the post-wall New Berlin. Like slaves have built empires everywhere. They never receive thanks. On the contrary, they are bums to be rounded up by the Arbeits Polizei and sent packing (but not too many!) back to their assorted hells.
Meanwhile, back in Goa, there was falling out on all sides. I kept thinking that I was to blame for the slowness of transforming the dripping catastrophe I had first visited into a gilded nugget. I was certainly (as usual) incredibly, maddeningly slow. Just how many times was that Mother of all opening nights postponed? The principal reason was of course the double-dealing which back-fired as often as it saved a Deutschmark. But along the way there was plenty of tax-deductible boozing, drug enjoyment - and cosy interviews between the top geezers and would-be waitresses. Would she swallow the Spiel and catch the highly contagious COME WITH US WE'RE GOING PLACES bug? If she wasn't sexy it didn't matter. Next!.

Returning with Neil to take photos perhaps a year later, we were thrown out by the bar-prick who refused to check our story with the boss. He even closed the shutters in our faces when we took pictures from the pavement. I had indeed created a restaurant of importance! Hence, for the portfolio, very few photographs of one of my most successful endeavors. If you are allowed in, go downstairs. The walls are alive with mossy greens; the rooms cool, intimate and strange.