Buffing and buffering Blu: the societal performance of street art, heritage erasure and digital preservation in Berlin

In December 2014 two of Berlin’s most famous street art murals were painted black. Fans of the murals responded by using social media to blame the owner of the ‘Cuvrybrache’ – the vacant plot in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg that the murals overlooked. Many assumed that a campaign to heritage-list the murals in response to the Cuvrybrache’s planned redevelopment had led the plot’s owners to take matters into their own hands. In fact, as this article details, it was more surprising who was responsible for the mural’s erasure: their creator, the street artist known as Blu. As some street art fans mourned their loss, the murals continued to be encountered by others, just as they always had, online. This article uses the case of the Cuvrybrache murals – replete with forces of ruination, processes of gentrification, and acts of iconoclasm – to explore the complexities of street art and heritage’s relationship with erasure and the manner by which this relationship is increasingly refracted through digital technologies and media. Drawing parallels between buffed urban walls and buffering digital screens, it argues that the pervasive digital preservation of street art encourages it and heritage in general to be further conceptualised as a societal performance.