EVENT DETAILS
Vernissage & Exhibition Opening
Date: 2 July 2026, 14:00
Venue: StudioTrouble™, Manteuffelstr. 73, 10999 Berlin-Kreuzberg
Admission: Free entry
More info:
The Project
Skateboarding has always resisted easy definition. It is sport, yes! but also a subculture, a social network, a way of reading the city. The Analog Archive project, Analog Kids, sets out to capture exactly that complexity, not through the polished lens of a professional photographer, but through the eyes of the children who live it every day.
The premise is refreshingly simple: kids are handed reusable analog cameras and sent out into Berlin's skate spots with one instruction, photograph everything that matters. Boards and tricks, yes! but also friendships, falls, rest breaks, street textures, city details. The full, honest texture of life in the scene.
What results is not documentation in the conventional sense. It is something more valuable: a first-person archive made by the very people who will carry skate culture forward. Authentic, curious, and entirely unstageable.
Shooting on Film
The choice of medium is deliberate. Where a smartphone produces hundreds of images in minutes, an analog camera demands patience. Each frame has to be earned. The child looks, decides, presses the shutter and then waits. There is no instant preview, no delete button, no filter. What you see is what you get.
The project also makes a conscious sustainability choice: only reusable cameras, never single-use disposables. After each round the cameras are collected, reloaded, and sent out again – a small but meaningful commitment to avoiding waste that mirrors the DIY-or-die ethic at the heart of skateboarding itself.
The Venue: StudioTrouble™
Few spaces in Berlin are better suited to show this work than StudioTrouble™. Tucked into Manteuffelstrasse 73 in Kreuzberg, the independent community gallery sits at the intersection of contemporary art and urban culture, and has long been woven into the fabric of the local skate scene.
It is not the kind of white-cube gallery that frames skateboarding as exotic outsider art. It is a place where artists, skaters, photographers and creatives share the same floor – where the boundary between subculture and institution feels genuinely porous. The Analog Kids exhibition will feel at home here.
Rooted in the Community
The project's infrastructure reflects its values. Cameras are not distributed by post or collected at a central office – they are picked up and returned at Berlin's local skate shops: Blue Tomato, Barrio Skateshop, Search & Destroy, and Titus, among others. These shops, as the Analog Archive puts it, are not stores so much as the scene itself. They know the kids, the spots, the local network. Routing the cameras through them is a statement as much as a logistical decision.
The project is supported by a tight circle of partners who share its sensibility: Blue Tomato, Irie Daily, Pixelgrain, Brettretter, Skatesencia, Curare Skateboarding, and Menschlabor Design Studio, the Berlin creative studio behind the archive itself.
"Kinder sehen anders – tiefer, ehrlicher, näher dran."
Children see differently – more deeply, more honestly, closer in. That is the proposition at the heart of Analog Kids, and the reason to see this show.