CITIES  2013 — 2016
Ceramic sculptures on mirrors and revolving stages
Color Photographs and Video

The starting point for the object and photography series Cities was a combination of two stereotypical elements of Italian culture for an exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute: the figure of Pinocchio and the ice-cream cone. Initially, the ice-cream cone with its color reminiscent of human skin served as a nose in the series "Pinocchie"-it turned out to be the ideal cipher for falseness and mendacity. Other objects developed from this basic idea, such as the gold-plated ice-cream cone city, which alludes to our economic policy. Its visual references are manifold. It refers to the famous Walt Disney Castle and at the same time reminds us of real and fictitious, myth-enshrouded places of wealth and power: of Superman's crystal city Krypton, of Neuschwanstein Castle, of the island kingdom of Atlantis described by Plato, of El Dorado, the legendary gold country in the interior of northern South America, of the Kremlin, of the Sagrada Familia and so on. If one understands the ice-cream cone as an industrial product, a closeness to Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans or his Coca Cola pictures arises. For Warhol, these mass products were a kind of symbol for democracy in the United States. It is similar with the ice cream cones, in that both the individual and the collective are part of the city: Many individual ice cream cones make up a "city". Several golden ice-cream cones multiply their power to form a collective that becomes a center. By positioning the work on a revolving stage, the perspective on the city is constantly changing, creating a cinematic and narrative element. With its glittering and shimmering surface it shows us different facets of itself. It is glorious, highly spectacular. She plays us something, just as the film plays us something.