Berlin has always had a magnetic pull for creative types, but as the city celebrates 25 years since the fall of its famous Wall this week, its lure for Scottish artists has never been greater.
Once a stomping ground for David Bowie, the German capital boasts two Scottish Turner Prize winners - Susan Philipsz and Douglas Gordon - as well as countless other artists living in its midst.
Its constant creative ebb and flow, movement and scenes have provided fertile grounds for innovative people, as Glasgow-born Philipsz has found, having been based in Berlin since 2001.
She has just enjoyed her most successful major show ever in her adopted home city, where the history seems to spark her creativity.
"At the start of the year I did a big solo show here in Berlin and it just finished," the sound artist says, in her bright Kreuzberg flat on this warm autumn afternoon.
"That was exciting - it was in Hamburger Bahnhof and I was absolutely delighted with it. It's such an amazing space.
"It was inspired by this guy from Berlin, a composer, Hans Eisler. He was one of the 12 tone composers under Schoneberg who were exiled - a lot of them had to flee the Nazis - a lot of them went to LA.
"Eisler stood out because his life was so fascinating. He was harassed by the FBI as he was considered to be a communist and eventually he had to come back to Berlin."
The artist's historical hunger for each of her installations is evident.
"Certainly I found living in Germany very inspiring when I first came, and it's so inexpensive and other artists are here," she says. But now I find the city itself still to be very inspiring, the more I am living here."
Eisler has really captivated Philipsz and she is to take her work on him further on a three-month artist's residency in Los Angeles at the end of next year.
"I was even thinking I could develop ideas for a film," she beams. One of Philipsz's up-and-coming projects is looking at war-damaged musical instruments in the Berlin Musical Instrument Museum.
"They're instruments that were saved from the bunker at Zoo Station (formerly West Berlin's main train station), so that sparked the idea," she says. "I was in Munich and Nuremberg making recordings from these instruments - they haven't seen the light of day for 100 years.
"It was quite emotional - I had to get a horn player to come to the museum in Munich to play it. It's got a bullet hole right through it."
After using the instruments for an installation for the East Side Project in Birmingham (which is on now), Philipsz will continue this theme in the forthcoming exhibition which will also be part of the 14-18 Now: WW1 Centenary Art project.
"It's already started, but my year will be '16 in Cambridge."
Asking about her upcoming shows requires Philipsz to make a note that's the length of a shopping list. With her exhibition in Birmingham, she also has "one in Vienna; a new gallery in an old farm in Somerset next March; Kyoto, Japan next year; and a solo exhibition at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City. And I'm going to Barcelona next week to do an exhibition."
Across in the far west of Berlin, working in more tradition mediums such as painting and sculpture, Margaret Hunter - originally from Fairlie, North Ayrshire - moved to the divided city in 1985, seeing the fall of the Wall for herself and heading over the Brandenburg Gate border crossing with the crowds of people 25 years ago.
"There were champagne corks popping, there was singing, laughing, crushes of people and crying," she remembers.
But for the artist, who studied as a mature student at Glasgow School of Art, it was the fall of the Berlin Wall that brought - and still brings - her widest audience.
"Not long after that I got a phone call asking me if I wanted to make a painting on the east side of the Wall. The west side was covered with graffiti, but never on the east. The lookout towers were still there as we painted in 1990."
Hunter's living room is filled with her work and double-head influences. "I did feel really privileged to paint on the Wall," she admits. "When I was painting the Wall, a young girl came along with her little Trabi car and bounced up beside me and said: 'I want to do a painting here, too.' I said: 'No, you've got to ask the organisers.'
"They said they didn't think there was any space left. So I said she could have one of mine. She pulled out her manual and copied her Trabi bursting through the Wall. The two paintings on the Wall that are the most important are the one of Honecker kissing Brezhnev and that Trabi."
Hunter pained a two-headed painting on her segments. "I had been making lots of paintings about heads and the double head," she explains.
"It's a bit of a theme of mine. I decided to turn the heads on their side as my space was huge. The two faces represent the two faces of Germany. Two big heads lying on their sides, so my first thought was 'Strange Bedfellows' - there was a huge difference between people of east and west."
Meanwhile, Katie Paterson, from Glasgow, lives in Berlin's Kreuzberg area, where she knew she'd live as soon as she set foot in the city.
"I first visited Berlin as an art student 12 or so years ago, and vowed to live there one day," the visual artist explains.
"I was attracted by the layers of time and history... and most of all by the energy and atmosphere of the place; the hidden aspects of the city, that by burrowing a bit further you could find yourself in strange happenings in unexpected places, like abandoned radio transmission towers in forests built from city remains."
Paterson says she is inspired by "Nature, space, time, the cosmos" and loves the fast pace of evolution in Berlin.
She says: "I first moved to Berlin several years ago by swapping an artwork for three months' rent. I didn't look back. It became clear I worked well in Berlin; the slowness of the city works in my favour as it slows me down too and enables a more creative state of mind.
"You can almost watch the change in the city like grass growing. It's inspiring to live in a city in a constant state of becoming. People and places come and go, which inspires a more experimental, creative approach."
Paterson's latest work is something few of us may live to see the results of, inspired by making the connection of tree rings to chapters.
"Future Library is a slow, evolving artwork that will unfold in Norway over 100 years," Paterson explains.
"I've planted 1,000 trees in a forest just outside Oslo, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in 100 years' time, when the trees are fully grown.
"Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unread and unpublished, until 2114. Our first writer is Margaret Atwood."
Susan Philipsz's Broken Ensemble: War Damaged Musical Instruments is at Birmingham's Eastside Projects until December 6. www.susanphilipszyouarenot alone.com
Margaret Hunter's Re-inventions is at Aquabitgallery, Berlin until November 22.
www.art.aquabit.com
Katie Paterson's work is currently part of group shows They Used To Call It The Moon at BALTIC, Gateshead until January 11 and Outer Space in Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn until February 22.
www.balticmill.com
Lillian McDowall looks at the regeneration of East Berlin, 25 years after the fall of the Wall, in tomorrow's Herald Magazine.
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