All but a few stretches of the Berlin Wall were torn down in the first heady months after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.). Yet some east Germans still cling to memories of the 40 years they lived under communist rule — memories that have grown more affectionate with time. Speciality shops and some websites offer east German board games, 15-packs of the infamously rough Cabinet cigarettes, Be Ready condoms, even cans of Trabi Duft — fumes from the iconic Trabant car — and the very brand of hair gel preferred by former east German leader Erich Honecker. Young Berliners still gather at “authentic” G.D.R. parties, where guests don the uniforms of state organizations, swill Little Red Riding Hood sparkling wine and dance to ballads like In the East, which sold 300,000 copies a few years ago. This phenomenon of nostalgia for the lost east is dubbed Ostalgie.
Berlin’s Memorial Mile
Groups representing both the homosexuals and the Gypsies began many years ago to plan for their own plot on Berlin’s memorial mile. But they were both stalled, not only by long processes to secure land and funding, but also by contentious infighting over what the memorials should look like and to whom, precisely, they should be dedicated.
For the Sinti and Roma, the dispute has been raging for years, with construction of the fountain to commemorate the 500,000 Sinti and Roma who died in the Holocaust originally set for 2004. But two separate groups representing Gypsies in Germany could not agree on the inscription, and the project stalled — transforming a rickety wooden sign marking the spot across the street from the German parliament building as an unintended monument to bitter infighting. Even the 2006 agreement by the German government to provide funding failed to resolve the stalemate.
The design calls for a fountain conceived by Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan, inscribed with a poem called “Auschwitz” by Italian poet Santino Spinelli. A triangular pillar will jut out of the fountain with a rose placed on the top of it. Once a day, the pillar will sink down into the fountain and the flower will be replaced. The project is expected to cost €2 million ($2.95 million). Construction is now set to begin in February.
Plans for a monument to homosexual Holocaust victims (the Nazis imprisoned 54,000 homosexuals and some 7,000 died in concentration and work camps) were delayed by a similar dispute. In 2003, the German government approved plans for a €600,000 memorial, but some advocacy groups objected to one facet of the design: a video of two men kissing that would play on an endless loop at one end of the monument. The video, they argued, did not recognize the suffering of lesbians as well as gay men. In the final design, a video of two women kissing will rotate every two years with the video of a male couple.
Curator Renaud Proche co-curated a series of archives of stuff in an artists studio:
http://the-backroom.org
When visiting an artist Renaud’s started to notice the things on an artists fridge door, the postcards on the walls and the tat that they had collected. He felt that by noticing these things he was starting to take in the things that were at the back of an artists mind.
As a visitor to the archives you were free to go through the artists stuff with no curatorial input.
Manilla files, archive boxes, sectioned filing cabinets, magazine racks, covered walls with cardboard with a selection of stuff.on, a TV hooked up and a sound station.
Renaud felt it was important to show this collection of culturally interesting and relevant things that might not get out into the world.
With each exhibition the material shown was different-relevant to the place where it was being shown (like a Medieval storyteller moving from town to town and adapting the stories) making it more live and alive.
This is an image of the clutter that Ursula Goldfinger argued with her husband, Erno about. Perhaps in the way that Daniel Miller in his essay,
Possessions’ talks about the residents of the modernist flats of the Lark Estate, who use ornamentation to express their individuality in an environment not of their choosing.
In its present state the garden looks abandoned: Manderlay at the beginning of Rebecca, encased in brambles, nettles and roses, it fulfils the romantic requirements of a sham ruin, where the cultivated growth of ivy symbolised authenticity and elevated the status of the ruin. If the garden is a narrative, it is at its haunting end. Or perhaps it is suspended in a sleeping-beauty state, a remembrance of something that no longer exists.
Yet it has always been this, and now it is a museum within a museum. Bodhan died five years ago and he is no longer to be found encased in this labyrinthine shell. The gate is locked and the new voice of the garden is his neighbour, Odette. Like the film, the Go-between’ which is set in 1900, written I 1952 but has the overwhelming look of 1970 when it was made; of the different eras that the garden commemorated, it seems to be set at 2005 the year that Litnianski died.
Hoffman Ma of Shanghai travelled to New York to buy Michael Jackson’s sequined glove for a quarter of a million pounds.
