The banner installation We (all) are the people by the renowned conceptual artist Hans Haacke has been hanging from the bridge between building A 1 and the lecture hall centre on the Haarentor Campus since the end of October. PhD art student Timo Merten brought it to Oldenburg to encourage reflection on the concepts it contains.
If you walk from the canteen and library building to the seminar and lecture room complex on Haarentor Campus, you can’t but notice the banner installation that has adorned the bridge between building A 1 and the lecture hall centre since the end of October. On both sides of the railings hangs a banner divided into three sections that reads “Wir (alle) sind das Volk” (We (all) are the people) in German and eleven other languages, including French, Turkish, Arabic and Polish, with rainbow borders to the left and right of the lettering.
“The bridge makes the walkway between building A 1 and the lecture hall centre seem like a gateway to the main section of the campus. Anyone entering or leaving via this point is encouraged to engage with the artwork and its message,” explains Timo Merten, a doctoral student at the Institute of Art and Visual Culture. Merten brought the installation to the university together with Professor Dr Friederike Nastold, who lectures in art history with a focus on gender studies. The installation is based on the artwork of the same name by conceptual artist Hans Haacke, whose art has attracted a lot of attention since the 1960s, primarily due to its political aspects. Haacke, who now lives in New York, first exhibited We (all) are the people in 2017 at the documenta 14 exhibition in Kassel. It featured the twelve languages that were most widely spoken in Germany at the time. In the following years, the banners were displayed at various universities and other public institutions, most of them in eastern Germany. For the Oldenburg installation, the banners were adapted to the surface of the bridge railings.
The aim is to spark a debate about belonging
“This artwork deals with the concept of ‘the people’, which is quite controversial. In its traditional sense, the term ‘the people’ has a far more exclusive meaning than the term ‘population’,” Merten explains. “For example, only people with a German passport would normally count as members of the ‘Volk’ (the people), whereas the population includes all the people living in Germany. Hans Haacke’s work breaks with this definition and symbolically makes the point – through the slogan itself, but also by representing all the languages on an equal footing next to each other – that all people can belong to the ‘people’.” With this message, Haacke is also taking a stand against the right-wing populist reinterpretation of the rallying cry “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people) used by the opposition in the GDR, Merten explains, because for this group the slogan did not have an explicitly exclusionary character. However, since the Pegida protests in Dresden in 2014 an aggressive, exclusionary, biological concept of “das Volk” has gained traction, which excludes not only foreigners, but in some cases even German citizens with a migration background. “Taking a stand against this through art is important to Hans Haacke, and also to me,” says Merten.
The artwork We (all) are the people references Haacke’s previous work DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the population), which was the subject of Merten’s master’s thesis. DER BEVÖLKERUNG was erected in 2000 – following a heated debate – in one of the inner courtyards of the Reichstag building, the seat of the German Bundestag. It consists of an area measuring 21 by 7 metres filled with gravel and soil and edged by wooden planks, with the dedication “Der Bevölkerung” installed at its centre in neon-lit lettering. Members of the Bundestag are invited to bring soil from their constituencies to Berlin and scatter it in the trough. Over the years, many shrubs and plants have taken root and grown from seed here. The resulting wild biotope symbolises the German population – and it remains untouched by horticultural intervention. The title DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the population) is a reference to the inscription “Dem deutschen Volke” (To the German people), which is affixed to the main entrance of the Reichstag building. As with DER BEVÖLKERUNG, Haacke’'s objective with his artwork We (all) are the people is to spark a debate about belonging.
