Wedding is a suburb of Berlin known for its Turkish population (which is actually only about 30%). We sat on a particular wall of Wedding every day for one week from 4-11th May, and constructed a Wall Embassy. The concept was to create a space that did not exist within national structures. Our research centred on 'Statelessness', which is a term denoting both people who have no nationality and are therefore not protected by international law, and the utopian idea of people who are free to float between national borders with relative freedom, such as I was doing on my way over to Berlin from Australia (although it was not as easy as this sounds).
People could join us on the wall by climbing the ladder and passing a simple test, which most artists failed. The test was as follows:
1) Think of an 'apple' and say 'banana'
2) Think of 'Europe' and say 'Egypt'
3) Think of a 'Beggar' and say 'Businessman'
photos: Amaryah Paul
The applicants were then told that they were 'allowed' or 'not allowed' and stamped.
I thought that since it was an embassy, it is logical that it should be bombed. People often target embassies with violence, and also something philosophical about the negation of the negation creating new alternatives. The bombing was organised for Friday 10th of May. The video of the bombing is below.
00005 from Richard Pettifer on Vimeo.
During the bombing and the subsequent flag-burning, a man came up and kicked our ladder and said something about Germany is falling. The video for that is below.
00006 from Richard Pettifer on Vimeo.
Video: Marlene Hänig
Further details about the project are at http://embassyofstatelessness.wordpress.com/ (English and German). This includes several conversations we had with people about statelessness while we were on the wall, which were explosive.
Thanks to Theatertreffen 50 for hosting this project.
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