borders - superurbanvillage

gelatin-silver paper, 70 cm × 100 cm each, 2016, Berlin

Berlin, Turmstrasse, 2016, Berlin

Berlin, Kleiner Tiergarten, 2016

Berlin, Ottopark, 2016

Berlin, Kleiner Tiergarten, 2016

Berlin, Ottopark, 2016

Berlin, Kleiner Tiergarten, 2016

Berlin, Ottopark, 2016

»Do you know what we call border?« the officer asks a curious television reporter who had come to a god-forsaken border town to produce a reportage about the refugee camp situated there. Without waiting for answer, he guided the young man to the vigilantly frontier zone: while the officer stood on a bridge poised over the dividing line between the two countries Greece and Turkey, he bended one leg, like a stork and said: «If I take one more step I will be... somewhere else, or... I will die?» If otherwise I will not do it, nothing changes. At such moments have often asked myself: why the madness with the borders?«


from: »the suspended step of the stork« Theo Angelopoulos


Along the road I whitewash the bark of several city trees with blank limewash. The line depicts a marking that contains the idea of a border. The term »border« stands for a mark that divides spaces. The line delineates from the familiar to the otherness, between the people of European countries of origin and refugees from crisis areas. The line begins at the Kunstverein Nord, which is intended here to represent the concept of culture: cultural development cannot arise from the familiar, but rather from the confrontation with the foreign. Culture has always been understood as the product of the change of one's own through the absorption of the foreign. The line ends at LaGeSo, the central service centre for asylum seekers, which is to stand here as a symbol for the current European refugee debate.