Repainting Hate with Art / LEGACY BERLIN "ART BEATS HATE"

The problem

LEGACY BERLIN was born in 2014, taking over from the legendary shop "DOWNSTAIRS" founded in 1993, and has become a hub of Berlin's graffiti scene. It's a homegrown voice from a city that has resisted through street art since the days of the Wall.

The insight

Berlin actually had a movement called #Paintback, where people would paint over swastika graffiti by turning it into pictures of mosquitoes. Painting over symbols of hate—that's something this city's graffiti scene has been doing for a long time.

The idea

The film opens in Berlin in the spring of 2016. As citizens welcome refugees, extremists hold demonstrations, and the city's walls fill up with "Refugee FUCK off" tags and swastikas. With the authorities unable to keep up, it's the graffiti shop Legacy that takes action. Under the banner "Let's #PaintBack," they release a promotional video showing how to turn the straight lines of a swastika into flowers, owls, mosquitoes, rabbits, and geometric patterns. The screen shows examples labeled "We made flower pots" and "We made animals," and the same technique gets shared through posters, magazines, and workshops. Soon it's not just the shop's crew holding spray cans—people around the city and even children join in, and one by one, symbols of hate turn into illustrations. The "paint over it" move that Berlin's graffiti scene has used since the days of the Wall gets turned on Nazi tags. The film captures, in real time, how places of fear become spaces for positive art—and how graffiti's own reputation gets repainted along the way.

What happened

According to the film, the campaign generated over 100 million ad impressions, earned media worth an estimated 5 million euros, and more than 10 million video views. Photos of repainted symbols posted online sparked participation from people across the country. Media coverage was widespread, with TV news outlets including i24NEWS, RTL NEWS, and arte, along with media in various countries, picking up the story. The New York Times reported, "Video of rehabilitated symbols has gone viral." COSMOPOLITAN wrote, "We are looking for imitators," and LE FIGARO's headline read, "Hunters of hate." The campaign won GOLD in 2017. It was created by HEIMAT BERLIN and LEGACY BERLIN.

Afterthought

There isn't a lot of information out there. But not many ideas hit this hard with just a title. Knowing there are people who've kept picking up paint and repainting over hate—that alone makes me happy.

Awards

• Cannes Lions Gold 2017

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