PRACHTSTRASSE
Slide film,
65:00 min. Stereo sound.

The slide film ’Prachtstrasse’ researches the ’walk of ideas’, that was part of the image-campaign ’Germany – Land of Ideas’. This was an initiative of the German government and the BDI (Federation of German Industries) during the soccer world championship in 2006. For the ’walk of ideas’ six monumental sculptures were erected in the centre of Berlin – all representing ’German’ inventions. An enormous sculpture of a pile of books, engraved with canonical titles from German literature was located atthe Bebelplatz – the square where the famed book burning took place. An Audi TT was positioned in front of the Siegessäule, and in front of the Reichstag a huge Aspirin pill.Upon closer inspection the organizers seem to have had another agenda; the strategic positioning of the sculptures on historically loaded sites shifted the connotations of these sites (and herewith German history) into a more positive note.


For the slide film projection intensive research into each of the six locations was made. The work narrates a darker part of German history from a perspective that the sculptures try to revise. The film draws parallels between historical events and situations from the summer of 2006, between the speeches of the image campaign and archive material of propaganda at the exact same locations. These narrations are constantly interrupted by descriptions and opinions of both existing and fictive persons. In this way the visitor is introduced to Heinrich Heine and a 72 meter high football player, the Jewish resistance fighter Herbert Baum and 22 dying soldiers, the father of Aspirin Arthur Eichengrün and the President of the BDI. The transitions from radio play to film are fluid. The text is accompanied by monochrome colours and reduced images of the sculptures. Only every now and then do the images start to move. The project as a whole aims to oppose the monumentality of the visual regime of the campaign with a more reflective language.