Freedom – a memorial

The “13Flocken”, the consulting agency that claims to find the worst solution for every problem, has been commissioned to design a memorial on the subject of “Freedom”.

After a long struggle and sorting out a few bad (and even some good) ideas, we proudly present:

Freedom – a memorial

Description:

“Freedom – a memorial” is a sculpture that roughly corresponds to the size and shape of an advertising column.

It is round, hollow, and consists of several L-shaped segments with a ring reinforced with barbed wire, like its model, the Berlin Wall. It is concrete gray and covered with tick marks (IIII /) all around up to a height of about 2 meters.

The tube has a steel door, the hinges of which are visible from the outside, no door handle, but a peephole through which you can see a wallpaper with the motif of a sun-drenched, snow-covered alpine panorama.

A thought experiment:

Imagine we lived in a perfect world, all people in it are free. But it comes as it has to: suddenly there is a villain and it is decided to lock him up. In order to sacrifice as little freedom as possible, a small, circular prison is built, just big enough to accommodate a single prisoner.

But the security needs of the free population are increasing, and another criminal is identified and caught in this almost perfect world. So that there is also room for him in the prison, the diameter is increased slightly, which should be feasible in a thought experiment, and the legal situation for the safety of all is tightened. As expected, a third criminal arrives, which increases the diameter again and ensures stricter laws, etc.

If the original prison was only the size of an advertising pillar, it grows to the size of a house, then a block, and soon it is the size of a small village, always surrounded by an ever-increasing, circular wall reinforced with barbed wire with a door in it.

More and more people are being put in prison. The wall already encircles an entire country, but it is getting longer every day. You can already recognize it with the naked eye from the moon for a long time, when it becomes so long that it divides the entire earth into a free and a non-free part like the equator line on a globe. The wall is now dead straight and has reached its maximum length. In order to imprison more people, the wall must now be shortened to enlarge the prison. The prison construction workers work tirelessly on the wall until one fine day the wall is the size of an advertising column again, behind which the last free person now lives in freedom.

The sculpture “Freedom – a memorial” shows this state. The viewer is himself a prison inmate and freedom is a lost utopia.

Supplementary description:

During the change between “inside” and “outside”, “locked up” and “being free”, another change has taken place, which the sculpture reflects. The door hinges are on the wrong side, the door opens towards the prison cell. The peephole is also on the wrong side: the prison inmates can watch and control the outdoors, not the other way around.

The unfree have taken power, the last free is a relic of the past, an exotic fairground attraction that can only be admired. The missing door handles indicate that everything will be done to maintain this condition.

Realization:

We think this memorial is so bad that we are considering taking it into our own hands. Set up in front of the government offices around the world, it will motivate those responsible to continue on their chosen path.

The core competence of 13Flocken is searching for and finding the worst solution, but not its concrete implementation. Therefore we are desperately looking for doers and supporters who want to help us.