Stigma
competitions
Stigma
competitions
Sculptural-Plastic Process + film documentary
1st price in the non open artistic competition for the realisation of a work of art for the "Memorial Site Stadthaus", Hamburg, 2019
...remembering is always part of thinking. Every thinking is, strictly speaking, a rethinking.
Hannah Arendt, Vom Leben des Geistes 1. Das Denken. München, Zürich 1989, S. 84
Through arbitrary destruction with sledgehammers and later clean-up and repair an unmissable "stigma" arises: the unbearable, repulsive marking of a central public space in Hamburg. Stigma is torn into the pavement in front of the newly opened city courtyards, which from 1933 to 1945 were not only the presidium of the Hamburg police, but also the headquarters of the state police and from 1935 of the secret state police (GESTAPO). The breach in front of the restored complex of buildings, which was transformed into a glamorous shopping quarter, will be filled with a soft, flesh-coloured layer of granulated split precisely to the edges of the breach.
The visible and tangible trace of repair is a hurting imposition in the heart of the city. It divides up the elegant urban space and forms a counterpart to the official exhibition and memorial space in the city courtyards, in which the fates of the victims are remembered and the profiles of their offenders are traced.
The flesh-coloured stigma is a walk-on sign, a think path that demonstrates violent arbitrariness and the impossibility of reparing what was destroyed. It opens up an ambivalent field of thought that cannot be dissolved or calmed down in any direction. The stigma remains disturbing for everyone and the brutality of the stigmatization that hits the urban space reminds again and again of the past terror and reflects the fate of the people who were followed and mistreated the city house.
All phases, the sculptural-destructive, the clean-up and the plastic process of "Stigma", will be public. Interested citizens will be able to follow live all steps of the work. They also will be reflected in a publication that adds the hitherto less noticed aspect of the longtime adjourned discussion about a central site of Nazi violence. The Stadthaus illustrates the fading-out of the Nazi past in the post-war years exemplarily. The building complex became a building authority and instead of an official remembrance in 1981 a commemorative sticker was placed at the entrance of the building - on the initiative of employees of the authority. And it was not until it was sold to an investor in 2009 that the city discovered its conscience. In response to public pressure, the city demanded from him adequate space for the long-lost debate about the site and for the commemoration of the victims. And parallely the senat of the city decided to provide funds for aninvited and anonymous art competition, from which "Stigma" at the end emerged as the winning project.