The month of September is devoted to Vol 1 contributors April Gertler and Dolores Alfieri. April contributed an amazing interview to Vol 1 and you can give it a read below in its entirety or on the magazine site at: http://www.the22magazine.com/Pages/AprilGertler.html

THE 22 MAGAZINE: Why did you choose to live and work in Berlin?

APRIL GERTLER: I finished graduate school and had done an exchange program in Germany and Frankfort at an art school there, and I was sort of weighing my pros and cons. I had always wanted to live in Europe. My father’s from Hungary, and my mother’s from Holland. I thought about living in Holland, but having this chance to be in Frankfort had been really exciting, and Berlin has always been this kind of city of promise. Berlin is really exciting and just offers so much. There is so much vastness and openness. There is still this feeling of opportunity, but the opportunity is very much there for you to develop yourself, which is what I also find really difficult about living in Berlin. There is a huge positive, but the huge negative is that there’s not a lot of energy coming from the city. What I mean is, here, in New York, you walk on the street and there’s sort of this vibration. There’s this buzz because there are so many people in the street; you feel people’s energy and get electrified from that. It doesn’t exist in Berlin. It’s a very slow city. It’s very calm. That is why I really like it, although, it’s very hard to get motivated. So, there’s this challenge with the city.

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