Innocent <> Guilty, 2009.
site-specific installation
military helmets
The installation consists of a room with the floor paved with army helmets, welded together in tiles so they form a stabile surface, where the visitors have to cross the room in order to get to the next part of the exhibition. I force the public to step onto the helmets, and walk across them.
The installation could roughly be divided into two parts. One is that I force the people to put themselves physically in a higher position then the military. To step on someone’s head is to humiliate someone completely, putting yourself in the highest position compared to the other.
The base reason of existance for any army is to defend the homelands, which is nothing more then a useless piece of nature if not for the people inhabiting it and giving that piece of nature a bigger meaning. But then the military is allowed to be in a physically superior position compared to the rest of the population, granting them a more powerful position. Every war thats fought in the end hits the innocent people more then the fighters. The most deaths in every war are not the soldiers fighting, but regular people that just want to do their job and see their kids grow up to have a better future. Most people don’t really care what’s happening outside of their village, though still they are the ones that have to pay the price for warfare.
Then rises the question, are those people really innocent? Thats the second part of the installation, the question about guilt. Who is guilty and how can you say what’s guilt? What seems guilty in one situation can be innocent in another. In the installation everybody enters innocent. They didn’t do anything yet. Then they are forced to disrespect the massgrave of soldierhelmets, and walk right across it as if it’s just streetstones instead of the most vital part of armor to a soldier, without knowing who wore it and who died in it. They don’t have another choice then to do so, just like most soldiers in war don’t have another choice then just to do try and make the best out of the mess they’re put into. Or most people don’t really have a choice to think different from what information they’re given. Propaganda makes it too difficult to the majority of people to see what’s real and what’s fake, as most people aren’t capable of criticising mental superiority. Then the question rises, who really is guilty? The german soldier that has been fed fascist propaganda his entire life and can choose between massacring innocents or being an innocent that sees himself and his family getting slaughtered? The palestinian freedomfighter that is willing to turn his body in a bomb as that really is the last resort in a country that has been one giant concentrationcamp for the last 50 years? Or the european citizen that can vote between one that puts afghanistans oil in a higher standard then a human life or one that will debate about it endlessly while the war keeps going on so not giving a solution either?
In the installation i switch the roles, turn the innocent visitors into guilty tombraiders and the guilty soldiers into innocent victims that helplessly get raided.