About An installation from 1997, a work by Ernst Barlach 1927 and the Podalida Island.This day I entered the Red Cross Store to look at and possibly buy some antiquarian book interesting me. In Baumgart`s Short History Of Art I saw a picture of the German artist Ernst Barlach,Monument For The Fallen (during the first WW), called The Floating with a face like the well known artist colleague Käthe Kollwitz.The Floating exists in at least two copies – the original has been smelt down by the German fascist regime – one i Cologne,in the Antoniter Church and the other in the church in Güstrow, some miles south of Rostock.
I was immediately stroked by the picture, remembering my own work, an installation, Shipwreck, in Linköping`s Skäggetorp Church in 1997, some months after the ferry catastrophe with the Swedish Estonia with many hundreds of dead.My installation consisted of two boats and an angel too, floating even her, or him. Today I can draw some lines of meaning between, and i can see a kind of texture or rhizome: parts of German history, my father´s death on board of a submarine as well as the deterritorialization of my mind seeking for “something” back in history, maybe an angel. The angel and the grief moved to another place as the angel himself. The place where all this happened I call Podalida, there is evidence and there is denying of evidence, connections, existence and death while the ocean around is rushing. Why does my angel ( 50 years after Barlach`s work which I didn´t knew ) appear as a diver ?
From Fritz Baumgart, Short Art History, DuMont, Cologne:
Ernst Barlach / Momument For The Fallen during WW I, called The Floating, 1927
Page from the catalogue AURA showing the Shipwreck installation ↓
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