When I read Clarice Lispector’s “The Hour of the Star” I was immediately fascinated by the book’s main character, Macabéa. What attracted me about her was precisely the fact that she wasn’t conscious of her misfortune.

It was the same innocence I had perceived in a character from Gustave Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education”. The novel contains a portrayal of the day-to-day life of a servant exploited by a middle-class family, working in exchange for her bed and board. But the servant doesn’t feel she is badly treated and is actually grateful because the treatment she receives from this family is nothing compared with the abuse she had to put up with in previous situations, and so she is happy.

Two novels, two fictions, two wounded innocents, two characters unconscious of their misfortune. Since reading “The Hour of the Star”, Macabéa has stayed with me. She has been at the back of my mind, waiting for a project to come along in which I could build something for her. And so I finally decided to build her a home, to make a gift to this fictitious character.

Later on, I went to Berlin as an artist-in-residence and there I had the idea of doing some fieldwork on the idea of the home, but then two things changed the direction of the project. To begin with, I spent the first few days near Karl-Marx-Allee. Secondly, the city made me ask myself the following question: How can you do fieldwork and speak of home in a profoundly gentrified city with lots of refugees who are nevertheless not visible?

On one of my many walks I reached the conclusion that I had come to Berlin thinking about the Bauhaus and its ideal home but I actually came across the Stasi and its idea of the “operational worker”.

During a guided tour of the Stasi Museum I was struck by the comfortable Ikea furniture in the recreation room next to the boardroom. According to the guide, the furniture was made using forced labour in Stasi prisons at the time when Olof Palme was a minister in Sweden.

On one hand, although the Minister for State Security Erich Mielke had a family, funnily enough a biological son Frank and an adopted daughter Ingrid, he also had a second home inside the Stasi headquarters and a secretary who obeyed his instructions every day and set the breakfast table according to an archive-file clumsily drawn by Mielke.

One city, two territories, two realities, two wounded innocents, two unconsciousnesses, an ideal Bauhaus chair and an Ikea chair made by a political prisoner, the impossibility of the ideal and the impossibility of the operational, south-east-west-north, the personal and the political.

How does one build a home in a city block happily camouflaged by lines of trees, parks and a nature so exuberant that you end up not seeing the homogeneity? Housing blocks devoid of any information where, from time to time, an inhabitant dares to break this uniformity with a few sunflowers … a shade … a banner … a canopy … and it is in these little personal expressions where I have located Macabéa’s home. Those little details were crucial in deciding that Macabéa lived here, and there, and also here. I’m not sure whether in the East or in the West, but it doesn’t really matter. I reached the conclusion that perhaps the wounded misfortune of Macabéa and of Flaubert’s maid came from their sentimental education, an ideal and operational education, and that perhaps what comes around, goes around.

T(Schuss)! Bye(Shot)

Bitte! Please