I want to love you but I’m getting blown away (2012)

Installation views at REH Kunst, Berlin. Sculptural and audio installation: Paper, cardboard, foamcore, adhesives, spray paint, audio soundscape (in collaboration with Mieko Suzuki). 1:1 scale models, dimensions variable. Photos: Bernhard Volkwein.

‘I want to love you but I’m getting blown away’ (2012) explores the fetishisation and reproduction of Berlin’s industrial wasteland aesthetic and our ambiguous relationship to the cliché it has become. Things abandoned and trashed, once reminders of the transition and history of Berlin, are now marketed and slipped seamlessly into the changing urban surface as chic design. Reflecting on these contradictions, ‘I want to love you but I’m getting blown away’ presents the trash found blowing around the Berlin streets as perfect but precarious paper models. Devoid of their histories and reduced to ideal, generic models of themselves, the paper replicas propose a kind of street culture that has been re-designed for the tourist market. In the installation, the trash merges theatrically with an industrial soundscape, mixed by sound artist Mieko Suzuki, which blends audio fragments from the street with Kraftwerk tracks. Suggestive of a spatially immersive music video/advertisement, the installation reflects on the clichéd package of Berlin that continues to blow us away.