Props - 2008

Invited competition, art in conjunction with architecture, Potsdam University

The installation consists of four red, cruciform propellers fastened just below the roofline of the building’s outside connecting walkway. At fixed times, they are briefly set in motion like aircraft propellers: starting up, gradually accelerating to maximum speed, then slowing down again. The connecting walkway between the building’s old and new wings becomes the wing of an aeroplane. In the installation, the lightness of the new building and especially of the roofed-over walkway – a deliberate architectural contrast to the heaviness of the old building – is referred to and heightened. The propellers’ basic shape and colour is borrowed from the emblem of the German Red Cross, whose significance and position during the Nazi period found expression at the time in the building of a prominent new headquarters. From the mid-1930s, one of the German Red Cross’s most important tasks was its commissioning for mobilisation – in readiness for a war that had already been planned. Its particular importance to the German air force is emphasised in many historical texts. The new headquarters was to “do justice to its main future task as part of the official medical corps of the German Army and the medical corps for air-raid protection”.
(source: http://drk.de/generalsekretariat/archiv/index.html)

A further link to flying is the addition by the Nazis of an eagle to the Red Cross emblem. But the work can also be viewed independently of historical context. When not moving, the propellers rest in different positions. Taken together, they appear as a composition of contextual or abstracts symbols, whose possible associations run from sticking plaster, to the cross, to the non-figurative Suprematist painting of Kazimir Malevich. The red of the propeller blades, intended in the case of the Red Cross emblem as a loud signal colour, inserts itself for the uninitiated observer into the range of red shades used in the building as a whole. The title comes from the English abbreviations for propeller and for properties; in this latter meaning from the world of the film, it also references the 1930s ‘Filmstadt’ project, of which the Red Cross HQ was the only building to be completed.