Paul de Gregorio has worked in fundraising since 1996; he is currently Head of Mobile at Open, a fundraising and communications agency. In his day job he finds ways to inspire the public to take action for some of the charities and not for profit organisations here in the UK and increasingly overseas. He blogs about it here. He’s also a fellow protest sticker-spotter, a habit he indulged on a recent trip to Berlin. In this post, Paul showcases some of the stickers he found, as well as reflecting on a museum exhibition he visited about antisemitic and racist stickers. He’s sometimes posts pictures of the stickers he finds on Instagram.

In my day job I help charities and non-profit organisations generate mass response to their campaigns and appeals.

In my spare time, down time between meetings and when I’m on holiday I spend an extraordinary amount of time taking pictures of political stickers on my mobile. I do it because I want to amplify some of the messages I see, but also because I find their designs a good source of inspiration for my day job.

Berlin is always a good place to find this stuff. On a recent trip I was lucky enough to be in town for the Sticky Messages exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum. The exhibition, to give it its full name, “Sticky Messages. Antisemitic and racist stickers from 1880 to the present”, was a detailed look at the history of the political sticker in Germany over time.

The exhibition itself is great, and whilst at the exhibition I learnt all about Irmela Mensah-Schramm. She is a 70 year old woman, well known in Germany for her personal commitment to the removal of neo-Nazi messages from public places. For the last 30 years Irmela has been scraping off and spray painting over all the neo-Nazi messages she finds. From time to time this has put her into conflict with local Nazis. But she continues to do it. Having removed over 70,000 stickers since she started, she’s now a hero of mine! You can hear more of her wonderful story in the film below.

You can also read more about her here.

And what follows are a tiny handful of the stickers I found on that trip…

Paul de Gregorio

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All photographs are my copyright. You can use them, I’d just like you to ask and credit me.

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