Apart from kindly hosting The Temporary Art Repair Shop as one of three featured projects in a panel discussion on social practice in the arts, Goethe Institute Washington DC of course also wanted its own transformed object. Fittingly for an office environment, Ms Blume choose to drop by with a piece of broken office equipment. Apparently, they have several similar desk lamps at Goethe, but this one had lost its shade, and the bulb didn’t work any more either. It was still a nice piece of solid Italian design though, and I was happy to keep and incorporate the well built adjustable arm on its solid foot into a new function.

An artwork requires a symbolical function much more than a practical one, even if I agree it should be well designed and constructed. For the German cultural institute in the capital of the US, I felt a magical re-enactment of the crucial influence of America on modern German society was called for. Instead of light though, I wanted to focus on wind, and specifically in this case, on the wind of change. The text on the side of the wooden fan, which you can see that I added on the image above, reads “Please keep air-flow Eastwards”. I hand-made the wooden funnel from some nice pieces of hardwood donated to the Repair Shop, and fitted it with twin computer fans, capable of delivering a hardly perceptible but still steady draft of air. Specifically the weakness of the wind in combination with its persistence pleased me. That wind of change that has for better and worse been blowing at Germany from the US for the last 75 years or so, has clearly had a huge impact on German society and culture, although being of course just one of the factors that has helped totally transform Germany since then.

Wind of Change by the Scorpions remains a huge reference to me from my own youth following the collapse of the Soviet Union on TV, from not very far away in neighbouring Sweden. For anyone growing up in those days under the constant shadow of the threat of nuclear annihilation, the significance of such changes are hard to remember correctly. For all the talk of terrorism going on today, I can’t help thinking that the non violent resolution of those tensions in the late eighties and early nineties completely dwarf everything happening today in significance, which we tend to forget, maybe precisely because they never turned close to as ugly as they had the potential to. For me, to commemorate what I see as a weak but steady wind of reform blowing eastwards over Europe during my childhood, the Office-Fan of Change feels a fitting memorabilia. Which Ms Sylvia Blume from the Goethe Institute seems to agree with.

It is especially nice to receive a photograph of the artwork “in situ” so to speak, from the recipient of it. Thank you!