In his work “mapping the past. Deutschlandskizzen 2”, director and visual artist Sebastian Hirn examines constructions of German identity. Four monuments are surveyed in a physically approach. The monuments were created in the course of the founding of the German Empire as an expression of a newly awakened national consciousness and showcase the first and last German Emperors Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II as powerful and oversized successors to the medieval rulers of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

In a 3-channel video installation, dancers encounter these symbols of power and establish a relationship with the architecture. The videos were filmed at the Kyffhäuser Monument, the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne, the Kaiser Wilhelm Monument at Porta Westfalica and the Deutsches Eck. A Steadicam and a camera drone were used to closely follow the dancer’s approach and investigation. The encounter reveals the fragility of the human body in the face of the monumental architecture and casts the structures in a new light.

Sebastian Hirn combines the film material with photographs from the former colony of “German South-West Africa”. The self-assurance of a unified German identity was accompanied by a claim to world power that demanded colonies for the “restored and united empire”. After the ground had been prepared through missionary work and private commercial initiatives and the African continent had been divided up among the European powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884, what is now Namibia became a “German protectorate”. In the spirit of “divide ed impera” (divide and rule), the German settlers and “Schutzsoldaten” (protection force soldiers) managed to dominate significant parts of the country within a few decades. After suppressing uprisings against the colonists, the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama population in 1904. Survivors were taken to concentration camps and their labor was exploited.

In “mapping the past”, dancers Alessandra Defazio and Julia Keren Turban perform in Studio 1 at Kunstquartier Bethanien, the former chapel of the old hospital. They extend the video’s playing area into the physical space. Accompanied by electronic sounds and live percussion performed by the musician Niko De Paula Lefort and Sebastian Hirn, they reinterrogate the visual material.

At the end, the space opens up for the Herero poet and performer Prince Marenga Kamaazengi, who sings of the Waterberg in a poem. There, in 1904 German “Schutztruppen” (protection forces) confronted the rebellious Ovaherero in a decisive battle and forced them to flee into the Omaheke Desert.

Before and after the performance, the piece will be framed by an exhibition of interviews conducted by Sebastian Hirn between 2022 and 2024. On six monitors, various voices from Namibia can be followed through headphones. The interviewees include a large landowner and descendant of a protection force soldier, Nama and Herero chiefs, the Namibian Minister of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform, a descendant of the Woermann shipping family from Hamburg and the chairwoman of the Nama Genocide Technical Committee.

Sebastian Hirn's work focuses on interview and research projects. He interweaves theater, dance, film and visual arts. “mapping the past. Deutschlandskizzen 2” is his second exploration of the pathology of German identity construction. In “reenacting the reenactment. Deutschlandskizzen 1”, he focused on the suicides of German poets and writers.