Pars pro toto – allegories of exploration

Competition Humboldt Forum Berlin – Staircase Portal V, 2017

Preliminary Considerations

The room was historically the antechamber to the Knights’ Hall in the castle, one of the most significant spatial creations by Andreas Schlüter. I have long admired Schlüter’s work, particularly his ceiling designs. With inexhaustible imagination, he stacks pictorial representations and virtuously combines a wide variety of visual forms. This creates an extraordinarily rich allegorical and optical network of relationships. With my project, I attempt to engage with this lost complexity and build upon it.

On the walls of the historic Knights’ Hall were allegorical depictions of the four then-known continents. They symbolized the terrestrial world, in contrast to the painted celestial world on the ceiling. The spatial envelope thus represented the cosmological order of the world, into which the builder, King Frederick I, placed himself ideologically. Today, the Humboldt Forum aims to display the “world collections” of the Berlin museums. A particular responsibility lies in fostering exchange and offering a comprehensive perspective on the “world.” In this sense, it continues an idea that the historical decorative program – though with a different purpose – already established at this location: presenting a comprehensive image of the world.

Description

Pars pro toto is concerned with exploring the world – perceiving it, understanding it, comprehending it, and researching it – and, if possible, (at least mentally) taking possession of and transforming the surrounding cosmos. At the same time, the potential for aggressive hubris inherent in this drive is not overlooked.

Many of the “attributes” in my allegories are inspired by Schlüter’s “Continents”: weapons, headgear (helmets, Native American feather adornments), flowing banners and draperies, heraldic animals (eagle, lion), plants (palm)… For example, the little boy who curiously pulls back a cloth to reveal a boat full of people refers back to Schlüter’s depiction of “Africa,” which shows a figure whose head is (still) hidden under a cloth.

The objects hang in the space like descending elements of an imaginary ceiling design. The individual elements could interlock like gears. The work only fully unfolds when the viewer moves through the room. Looking through the window into the Schlüter courtyard establishes a dialogue with the castle architecture and its allegorical statues and emblems.

Wolf von Waldow, 2017