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Andi Michele Brandenburg
Street photographer / mixed media artist +
owner Besos Not Bombs

Latina, Armenian American adopted into a German Jewish family raised on the border later to spend adult life living between SF and Asia. Growing up with a mixed race and cross-cultural background lead Andi to speak a language she calls "Jaspanglish," a combination of Japanese, English, and Spanish. Language plays an important role in her work.
Andi grew up during the height of the hip hop and punk rock era influenced by street culture, graffiti, raw photos from glen e friedman and art from jean-michel basquiat. Subjects of her work range from identity, roots, race, genocide, and marginalized people struggles to the documentation of breakin, skateboarding , and underground street culture worldwide. She combines the street element with that of the village.

A completely untrained artist, she creates from the corazon. She has a love for anything Latin especially musicians such as willie colon y hector lavoe. She feels these are her true roots and something that has been with her since before time. She has a degree in cultural anthropology and Southeast Asian studies from UCSC where she completed her year long thesis while living in a village before the uprisings in Indonesia in the nineties. While living in Java, she documented ghost stories and their relation to contemporary Indonesian religion and played gamelon music with the village elders..

In the late nineties, she spent several years living in Tokyo writing about street fashion and underground Tokyo trends and working as a hip hop photographer for Tommy Boy Records, Tokyo with English photographer Andy Beezer. In addition, she worked as a VJ in a mix of Japanese hip hop and punk rock clubs for Kazenohito Bito, her crew in Tokyo. Due to illness, she returned to SD at a time when “Blackmarket” was a strong presence in the city and street art shows like “modest behaviour” were on the rize....

Shortly after, the war on Iraq broke out. Fighting illness, she continued to attend the local anti war protests. With no end in sight and discouraged by American conservatism, she left the country to live in the political Gracia District of Spain, where anti-war protests and anti-war sentiment filled the walls and streets. There, she spent several months creating a new body of work and the clothing line “besos not bombs.”

“ If the atmosphere of America is waging war on terrorism and feeding consumerism, the most direct way to get messages through to the average person is to make signs out of what it is people want to consume, cultural ammunition on cloth! The average person here is so blind to what is really going on in the world - they still think that el Salvador was Americans going in to save the people from communism, they don’t realize that hundreds of women have been violently murdered at our borders for the past decade, and they think that the holocaust is the only genocide. What they don’t see is that the current situation is all a mask for indigenous genocide so the man can get his cash. History just keeps repeating itself. Humanity has taken on this sense of helplessness and loss of hope. Those of us who have an opportunity have to use our voice “voz alta.” Artists shouldn’t just masturbate on canvas. They have a responsibility to the people to educate and reveal the secrets and the history the media hides. We can be our own media. History has always had this! Look at Frida, she wasn’t this sickly macabre artist that she is often portrayed as, she was a revolutionary marching in the streets until the day she died. She expressed her pain, but she also felt a sense of responsibility for the people. Ok, So I have a bleeding heart, shoot me!”
-andi