Next Level Propaganda: when Berlin projected its new brand onto its own city hall

Saturday, 12 September 2020, the second evening of a Festival of Lights reshaped by the pandemic. In front of the Rotes Rathaus, Governing Mayor Michael Müller announced Berlin's new brand. Then the building took over. A bear in rainbow stripes filled the tower, and #WIRSINDEINBERLIN ran in white capitals across the top storey of the red brick façade. The festival's closing report put it plainly: the mayor presented the new bear in a 3D video mapping “auf seinem Regierungsgebäude”, on his own government building.

We made that mapping. When we uploaded the film three days later, we gave it a title: “Next Level Propaganda”. It was meant with a wink, and it still is.

If there is one medium made for monumental propaganda, it is 3D mapping on huge buildings. Nobody would use that word for it today, which is a little ironic. So our title said it with a smile: if you do propaganda, then like this.

Stefan Ihmig, founder of RE:SORB

This article takes the joke seriously for a moment: where does city branding end and propaganda begin, and what does the studio behind the projectors actually decide?

A new brand for Berlin

#WirSindEinBerlin, “we are one Berlin”, was the State of Berlin's new brand, commissioned through the Senate Chancellery after a tender in 2019. It replaced the older slogan “be Berlin”. Jung von Matt/Brand Identity designed the logo with its redrawn bear, and Jung von Matt/Spree made the campaign. The brief, HORIZONT reported, was to strengthen understanding between people in a divided society: more cohesion, more of a “we”. The Senate formally adopted the new brand design in January 2021, with the bear as its central element.

The launch needed a stage. In 2020 the Festival of Lights ran its 16th edition as a pandemic special, “Together we shine”, from 11 to 20 September, spread across all twelve districts so that crowds would thin out. The programme gave the Rotes Rathaus one evening, 12 September from 9 pm to midnight, as the start of a “bear tour” through the districts.

The building could hardly be more symbolic. The Rotes Rathaus, named after its red brick, was built between 1861 and 1869 to designs by Hermann Friedrich Waesemann. Its tower rises 94 metres to the top of the flagpole, and since 1991 it has been the seat of the Governing Mayor and the Senate Chancellery.

Who did what

Our commission ran through three hands: the Festival of Lights paid us, we worked together with Jung von Matt, and in the end the money came from visitBerlin and the Senate. The bear was the client's design. Every animation was ours. The full show runs 119 seconds and repeated through the evening, and our film shows it from start to finish.

Technically, the show ran on 12 channels, with the projectors stacked in threes for brightness and calibration by domeprojection, as the calibration specialist VIOSO describes in its case study.

Then the bear went on tour through the districts. Our team made four more of its stops: the Theater an der Parkaue in Lichtenberg, Rathaus Neukölln, Schloss Köpenick and the Bezirksmuseum Marzahn. The festival's own text says only that the Senate Chancellery brought the new bear to the city “with its own light show”. That is normal: on a brand launch, the brand is the author.

One festival, many senders

The Rotes Rathaus was not the only official message in the city that September. According to the festival's closing report, ten federal ministries, the Federal Press Office, the European Commission and the European Parliament put images on Berlin's façades, among them a heart for 30 years of the Peaceful Revolution and German unity. Mastercard mapped the Victory Column for its “hallo mastercard” campaign, O2 the Oberbaumbrücke. Around them stood about 100 artworks by 52 artists from 8 countries.

The festival itself is not a state event, as its FAQ points out. Franziska Giffey, Governing Mayor in 2022, called it “eine privatwirtschaftliche Veranstaltung”, a privately run event, and an important one for tourism. The festival's magazine describes its part as putting campaigns' messages “into an artful context”.

On the street, all of it speaks one language. Light on stone looks the same whether a ministry, a bank or an artist sent it. Only the content tells you who is talking, and passers-by rarely stop to ask.

Propaganda, branding, communication: what is the difference?

The word began innocently. It comes from the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, a body the Catholic Church set up in 1622 to spread the faith; the Latin means “things to be spread”. In 1928 Edward Bernays, often called the father of public relations, published a book about his own trade and titled it simply Propaganda. Over the 20th century the word turned thoroughly negative, and no democratic government would use it for its own communication today.

Scholars still use it, carefully. Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell define propaganda as a “deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions” in the interest of whoever sends it. By that yardstick a lot of everyday communication qualifies, so it helps to name the neighbours.

Our working distinctions, not textbook definitions. Real cases often sit in two rows at once.

The evening at the Rotes Rathaus sits in the third row, with one foot in the second: a state brand, presented in person by the head of government, on the seat of government. The old word appears only where we put it, in a title with a smile.

Why light on a building carries a message so well

Berlin found this out early. In October 1928 the city held a light festival, “Berlin im Licht”. Mayor Gustav Böß gave it the slogan “Licht lockt Leute”, light attracts people, and floodlights picked out the Reichstag, Museum Island, St Hedwig's Cathedral and the city hall. The Berliner Philharmoniker call it an early form of today's Festival of Lights.

Governments elsewhere use their own landmarks the same way, usually for national celebrations: Canada's “Northern Lights” on the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa from 2015, a life-size Saturn V rocket on the Washington Monument for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2019, and since 2019 “Palace in Motion” on Abu Dhabi's presidential palace Qasr Al Watan, commissioned by the emirate's Department of Culture and Tourism.

From our side of the projectors, the reasons are simple. A façade is bigger than any billboard, and a building lends a message its own authority: a city hall talking about the city sounds different from a poster with the same words. The audience stands together in front of it, so the message becomes an event rather than an advert, and it travels on as photos and videos.

Projection mapping is the most monumental way to say something in public: the building lends the message its scale and its authority, and by morning the stone is stone again.

Mapping also suits a logo's rules. Berlin's brand guidelines today keep the bear's outline fixed and free only its surface, which is how a projection treats a logo anyway: the shape holds still, the light inside it moves.

The same tool, turned around

Light on public buildings can also answer back. The artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has projected onto monuments and state buildings since 1980 and set out his approach in a 1983 essay, “Public Projection”. In 1988, in the middle of the US presidential campaign, he projected onto the round walls of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. In 2011 Occupy Wall Street activists projected a “99%” onto the Verizon Building in New York, the start of the collective The Illuminator. In Berlin, the police banned projections onto the Russian embassy during a demonstration in February 2024, and the courts upheld the ban.

Same light, same stone. The medium does not care who holds it.

Who holds the façade

So what does the studio decide? Less than people think, and more. On a commission, the message belongs to the client: the brand, the bear, the hashtag. We decide everything that moves: how a logo drawn for posters enters a 94-metre tower, how it meets windows, cornices and arches. A logo is made to stand still. On a building it has to perform.

Other façades come with other freedoms. Moscow's Circle of Light festival is a project of the city government, yet its Art Vision competition handed the Bolshoi Theatre to the artists, with content of their own. Our works won First Prize there twice: Synergy in Art Vision 2018 and DUAL in Art Vision Classic 2019. At the Festival of Lights 2025, The Cathedral of the Infinite Scroll, our own reflection on the attention economy, played on Charlottenburg Palace and was a prize winner of the Festival of Lights Awards 2025.

So, propaganda?

Is a city's brand on its own city hall propaganda? In today's vocabulary it is city branding and government communication, and that is what we call it too. Our title was never a verdict on anyone. It was a studio's joke about its own medium.

But the old word keeps one useful idea. A message on a monumental building borrows the building's authority, and everyone involved should know it. Our part is to make it worth looking at. If you do propaganda, then like this. Watch the full show on the project page, or read more about our projection mapping for buildings and events.