Is Heimat thus associated with consumerism? When we embellish them with violence, pornography and stark colours, people wake up and start revising their notions.Ĭafébabel: In your exhibition you also included some petrified models of takeaway fast food. Normally, nobody gives cuckoo clocks a second thought. Everybody knows them. I transform the tradition and make something new to provoke people into thinking about what Heimat really is. When you google Heimat one of the things you can find is pictures of cuckoo clocks. Stefan Strumbel: I am breaking existing conventions to find something new. One trend replaces the original elements of cuckoo clocks with motifs associated with violence, pornography and death. Heimat will mean a different thing for everybody.Ĭafébabel: The artworks in the exhibition are sometimes contradictory. Today, some refugee kids travel on similar inflatable boats to their deaths. Back then I felt safe and happy with my family. This is an island from my childhood I used to float on it with my father and mother during the holidays. In my exhibition you can see a bronze inflatable island with a palm tree. For example the situation of 60 million refugees at the moment – they have to leave their countries and their homes and they are hoping to be able to create a new Heimat in a new land. Stefan Strumbel: In terms of my art, and myself, yes! However, Heimat can also include the bad sides of life. Once I had an exhibition in the USA called " Deine Heimat" (Your Heimat) and everybody was asking me: "What the fuck is Heimat?" That’s the origin of the question.Ĭafébabel: So is Heimat inherently a good thing? It's a happy place? Even if you can translate the word Heimat into English, you cannot translate this feeling. However, Heimat exists everywhere in the world everybody needs that feeling of love and warmth. That movie generated so much publicity that afterwards people thought that Heimat was solely a Black Forest phenomenon, and that it only consisted of a good side. The word was already appearing in 1833 in a dictionary by the Brothers Grimm. The first big motion pictures in Germany – like Schwarzwaldmädel– were Heimat films. It has always appeared to be strongly related to the Black Forest (or Schwarzwald in German). Stefan Strumbel: It's a big question for me because Heimat is a feeling. What does this mean for refugees coming to Europe? Can a Heimat also be a hostile place?Ĭafébabel: So Stefan, to quote the name of your exhibition, what the fuck is Heimat? It refers to the place and state of mind that we associate with home. But that’s ok nobody really touches the clock so that is ok.In his series of sculptures and artistic installations, German artist Stefan Strumbel takes as his subject Heimat, a continually recurring notion in Germany. Then I cleaned them very good with TSP cleaner since you can’t really sand the intricate pieces. Lay out the top leaves, swinging pendulum and pinecones on your clean tarp. The electrical one had a light sensor on it and, get this, was made in Korea. I finally found one small vintage mechanical clock ($40) made in Germany and one very large electrical clock ($25) on craigslist. I all of a sudden was obsessed with finding a cheap cuckoo clock that I could paint. Materials needed to paint a white cuckoo clockīut the seed was planted in my design brain and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
He told me that I had no clue how expensive that clock was and that he would be really mad at me if I would ruin it with paint. I told my father that I was itching to spray paint the clock white. DIY painted white cuckoo clockĭon’t be scared, I didn’t paint this beautiful high quality wooden cuckoo clock that my parents bought fo me. I figured it was broken…but haha no such luck. One of my cats had jumped at the cuckoo bird at the 2 o’clock chirp (I know that because it was stopped at 2). One day I returned home to find the clock lying on the floor. But since I really miss my family and I have to admit that it reminds me of Germany, I hung it up. Especially since I hate being guilted and forced into any design decisions. I was less than thrilled to display my brown carved clock in the living room. So a couple of years ago, my parents thought it would be very funny to send me a cuckoo clock to the US and guilt me into hanging it up.
They reminded me of old people’s traditional style or (yes, I said it) American tourists. White cuckoo clocks, not so much, right?Īs a German citizen and growing up in Germany I hated cuckoo clocks.
I guess to most non-Germans, brown wooden cuckoo clocks represent an example of what should be in a typical German home along with carved wood furniture and beer mugs.
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