We are big fans of guerrilla activities of all sorts, from the making of art and theater to gardening and marketing. So we loved stumbling on this picture of a striking guerrilla action that took place in Berlin recently: While cars were stopped for green lights, a group of cyclists dumped 13 gallons of colored paint in large puddles onto the street in Berlin’s busy Rosenthaler Platz. As the cars drove through the puddles, their tires inadvertently became brushes to spread the paint, creating a constellation of colored lines. (The artworks’ masterminds posted signs nearby explaining that the paint wasn’t harmful and would wash off with water.) Like the best guerrilla actions, this one shakes up habitual thinking and seeing (and hence maybe living) in positive ways.

Modern urban guerillas take their essential strategy from guerrilla warfare “to focus around the use of a small, mobile force competing against a larger, more unwieldy one”*; they rely on time, energy and imagination rather than conventional methods. And they always have an element of surprise, even if they don’t mean to – like the taxi drivers that create small farms throughout the Bronx in the summer…just because they want to grow stuff and eat it. So they find small, unlikely, overgrown parcels of land and plant…their…crops…

Stumbling on a tiny corn field in the middle of New York City changes your view in an instant!

We’ve come to realize that most creative people are guerrillas of one sort or another, planting ideas, shaking things up, pointing in other directions that we might not have been thinking…

…which is what we hope to do too…

Related posts: New York City’s Taxi Farmers

How to Be a Guerrilla Gardener

Joshua Allen Harris Subway-Fueled Street Art

via Arbitare and Reference Library

*Wikipedia