5 Transportabel. In conversation with  Christof Zwiener

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from: ADN gatehouse, “SOME POWER, THAT HARDLY LOOKED LIKE POWER, SAID I'M ONLY PERFECT IN AN EMPTY ROOM”, Friedrich Kunath, Los Angeles, 2014

We know each other through the project "Black Box". You had dealt with the unknown construction history of the art space "Praline" – a small wood-paneled hut on "Lützner Straße" in Leipzig. You sawed a piece out of the ceiling and literally uncovered layers of time. The visitors were given a time-limited, excerpt-like insight into the roof truss. This method of making transformations visible can be found in many of your artistic works, but also the mapping and documenting of places, objects or buildings, for example in the work "nach 1990 – Fokus Fahnenmast". Is this an attempt to capture objects and their narratives and save them from disappearing?

For me, many things in public space, even rather inconspicuous ones, possess the aura of a history of use. I want to make that more visible, more perceptible. Former GDR flagpoles, for example, are practically overlooked in everyday life. I spent over four years researching flagpoles in East Berlin, documenting them photographically and creating an online map with 315 locations. Since the reunification of the country, they have been forgotten, unused and thus became seemingly invisible. They are now overgrown or covered by new architecture. For me, these are important anchor points in the present that point to the past and to a history of use. For many people in the former GDR, flags and banners were commonplace. I come from Osnabrück, and in my environment, hoisting the German flag was always considered something that only „Neo-Nazis“ or strict patriots did.


from: „nach 1990 – Fokus Fahnenmast“, Book page 339, „twenty-five years of solitude“, Weißensee. Amalienstraße/ Parkstraße (#75)

You are planning to return ten of these flagpoles to Sweden, i.e. to place them in a different geographical context and thus in an alternative context of meaning. However, you do not have a media-effective handover in mind, but rather a remote location in the forest. What significance are the poles to be given there?

I was fortunately able to save ten flagpoles that stood on the former Centrum Warenhaus at Berlin's Ostbahnhof. The building, including the poles, was designed, planned and built by the Swedish company SIAB from 1976 to 1979. The flagpoles were designed and produced in Sweden and brought to Berlin. During the complete reconstruction from 2018 to 2020, I was able to save the ten steel poles, each nine meters long, after consultation with the developer and owner, and removed them there. I would now like to bring them into a different context and I am thinking of a final location by bringing them back to Sweden. I have in mind a forest clearing in Småland, accessible only by a footpath. It would be best if you can't get there directly and can only perceive the masts from a distance. An ideal location would be docked to a 200-kilometer hiking trail, and there would be a notice there about the history of use of the flagpoles. I would like to make history and transformation processes visible. On the one hand, the poles would thus be preserved, but on the other hand, their former presence would be taken away. The site would be something like a grove of honor, but by no means a place of worship. The flagpoles are also a reminder of the GDR's economic cooperation with non-aligned Sweden.


from: Christof Zwiener, „location concept study“, Småland 2020

The approach reminds me of an older work of yours, in which you dismantled a complete gatehouse in Berlin and set it up in the "Wende Museum" in Los Angeles. What does the change of location do to the object?

This gatehouse was an object in public space that often existed in East Berlin, so it's visually familiar. It is a two-square-meter transportable cottage made of steel, aluminum sheet and glass, which was produced about 500 to 1000 times since the 1970s. This control house was designed for an employee of the People's Police or border troops and was placed in front of embassies and other important buildings or ministries. I discovered one on the grounds of the former headquarters of the ADN (Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst – former GDR news agency) in Berlin Mitte. It functioned like a kind of time capsule, everything was still in there. The new developer of the building, a private investor, gave it to me as a gift in 2013 on the condition that I remove it immediately. I took it to another location with a tow truck and curated a total of twelve exhibitions with changing artists. In early 2014, the Wende Museum in Los Angeles expressed interest in the building. They collect objects from the former GDR and the "Eastern Bloc" countries. I wanted this building to remain after the exhibition series, but to undergo a further transformation, and handed it over to the Wende Museum. However, I completed my conceived exhibition series with four exhibitions in Los Angeles. Since 2016, it is an exhibition object in the museum garden next to a Trabant and palm trees.


Abb.: ADN gatehouse, "LIFTING", Franka Hörnschemeyer, Berlin 2014

You describe your projects as ephemeral and time-based. Often they are actions in public space that are only visible for a short time, refer to the past and ask questions about a future, only to disappear again shortly afterwards. In "Snowball" you throw snowballs at representative architectures in Berlin, including the Berlin Wall, the no longer existing "Palast der Republik" ("Palace of the Republic"), various statues, and huge advertising billboards. In contrast to the selected bombastic gestures in the urban space, this artistic action is rather short-lived and quite inconspicuous. Who sees and experiences these works? What is your relationship to an audience, to attention and visibility?

I carried out this action in the winters between 2004 and 2012, mainly in Berlin. I do not refer to myself as a performer in this work, but continue to refer to myself as a sculptor. It was a mixture of humor and provocation. In terms of reactions, there was actually everything from laughter to insults. When I threw a snowball at the Reichstag building, a security guard came to me and asked if I didn't appreciate the high house. However, I had not planned the snowball throwing as a disparaging act, but first only as a marking of a place. A mark that apparently disappears again quickly. The Palace of the Republic, the New National Gallery, monuments of Hegel, Goethe and Schiller, the advertising space – these are all massive identity-forming areas in public space. But also icons of the times. That's why I finally included firewalls of buildings. These have been and are still being built over, and are thus disappearing. In this respect, it can also be perceived as surrender. The individual throwing actions were always only a short moment, which in each case not many people perceived. The total action over the longer period at different places is documented as video summary. If one looks at this currently, the reading of this gesture changes retrospectively, just as the places and their contexts of meaning change.


Christof Zwiener, video still "Intervention with Snowball" video (4:3), loop, 2004-2012.

A series of talks by Ex_Praline and Verlag Trottoir Noir, 2021
Yvonne Anders, conversation and editing;
Marcel Raabe, editing