Herfurtner: This is a contradiction. And I emphasize this contradiction when I ask what a weapon is and then depict harmless objects in the exhibition. In addition to the ones you described, there are also, for example, baseball caps, mouth guards, painting suits, gloves, or spoons.

The point of reference for the work is §17a of the Assembly Act (VersG) and the prohibition of so-called passive armament described therein. I happened upon this term by chance when I read about it in a newspaper article in 2017 on a trial in Berlin. The report was about a case against a demo paramedic who was convicted in the first degree for wearing protective clothing while on duty. This ruling was revised in an appeal by the Berlin Regional Court the following year, but in practice this meant that for one year it was not clear whether demo paramedics in Berlin were liable to prosecution if they wore protective clothing during operations.

It’s relatively clear to everyone what a weapon is: an object or tool that can be used or is intended to be used to cause harm to another person. But how is it possible that the opposite of a weapon, an object of protection, becomes a weapon?

At the time, I was reading up on the application of §17a VersG and also researching a related topic; cases where makeshift weapons were made from everyday objects. I mainly found testimonies from psychiatric contexts at the beginning of the 20th century and from prisons in which spoons, dustpans, or mattress springs were painstakingly and creatively sharpened, panes of glass were taped with bandages to fashion makeshift knives, etc… I found all of this interesting, but didn’t have the urge to develop the topic and let it rest.

It was actually my change of perspective. On one hand, I have been politically active for years, and the question of how to protect oneself at demonstrations has a different sense of urgency. And secondly, I was in New York City in May and June 2020. After George Floyd was murdered by a police officer, there were many protests against racist police violence in New York City, as in many other cities in the United States. For a month I was almost exclusively going to demonstrations and got to know a protest culture that is very different from my experiences at protests in the FRG.

I was amazed by how actively people protected themselves and the measures they took to preserve their own physical integrity and that of others. For example, face masks and shields were distributed at demonstrations. After there were reports that the police would use LRADs (Long Range Acoustic Devices), earplugs were handed out. There were also people distributing water and food from shopping carts or car trunks.

And via the question of which material circumstances condition these different protest cultures, I ended up back at the Assembly Act and §17a.

The §17a VersG makes it possible to criminalize objects that actually serve to protect physical integrity as “passive weapons” or Schutzwaffen [protective weapons] when worn or carried at open-air political rallies. Schutzwaffen are not weapons, but rather everyday objects with which you can protect yourself. Or, in the language of the Assembly Act: “objects intended [...] to repel measures of enforcement taken by a holder of sovereign powers.” The §17a VersG was introduced in the FRG in 1985 and violations were punished as administrative offenses. In 1988, violations were then upgraded to a criminal offense.

When I put §17a VersG into a larger political context, I see that it is about the state's access to the bodies of its citizens. Who, if you please, should not defend themselves against police action. I’m interested in how people enact their protest in public space, and what kinds of practices they invent to protect themselves and others in the process.

§17a VersG isn’t only about the so-called "passive armament,” but also about the prohibition of covering your face. This means that objects that could be used to prevent identifying a protestor can also be criminalized. These include balaclavas, caps, sunglasses, or scarves.

With regard to covering your face, there are usually conditions imposed by the police at demonstrations. Such as, you can wear one element, but not two or three. This means, for example: it’s okay to wear sunglasses, but not sunglasses, a hooded sweatshirt, and a scarf all together.

Here, too, there is a distortion of what are actually democratic assumptions, namely that the power of the state should come from the people. This means, for example, that when exercising their democratic rights, like the freedom of assembly, citizens should be protected and able to protect themselves. And that those entrusted with the exercise of sovereign authority, in this case the police, can be held accountable for their actions at any moment if they overstep their authority.

I have two series of reliefs, Handles and Protective Shield. And I think Handles comes close to a register. For this work, I looked at how protective objects could be improvised from everyday materials. A moment that interested me was how handles from all kinds of everyday objects could become protective shields. In my installation, the handles have another function. They emphasize the shield character of my wooden reliefs without the reliefs themselves becoming shields.

Protective Shield should do more than illustrate objects. This is why I’ve arranged the objects in still lives. First, like incidental arrangements in private or office spaces – like before a demonstration or confiscated as evidence. In doing so, photographs from police public relations were a point of reference for me. The fact that the police actively do public relations, write press releases, and promote their work on social media is controversial in terms of civil rights. I think it is important to point out the conflict of interest that exists when the police, as the bearers of sovereign power, legitimize the exercise of that power through the media.

In 2022, I then began to portray objects in public space – as the place that conditions protests and where objects get their protective and resistant function.

To the first question: Basically, yes, art is always political. And when I look at the degree to which art is commercialized and integrated, then of course I first see the efforts of the capitalist system to curb this potential.

I don't consider art to be activist (a word, by the way, quite common today, which the Nazis established in German as a positive self-designation). Quite the opposite. I’m always a bit wary when I read a text in which art "interrogates," "engages," or "intervenes." Because art is ascribed something here that it can’t accomplish. When a work in a museum is deemed to "question" the practices of, say, a German arms manufacturer, it operates at most on the ideological level. The responsibility to expose, criticize, and organize against the corporation's business, however, lies beyond the museum.

I find it more difficult to answer the third question about what is feminist about my practice. It is clear that my identification as a woman* is not enough to make my artistic practice, which in many aspects resembles that of an entrepreneur, a feminist one. The question is rather, what does my practice do for the emancipation of FLINTA*¹?

Of course, I am concerned with feminist practices – an example would be the discussion event Not one* less – in which I created temporary spaces of exchange and learning. And the question of how we actually guarantee our bodily integrity at protests is also a feminist question – because reproduction and reproductive labor is also feminized and privatized. Making these activities public rejects the constricting division between private and public that has been exhaustively repeated since antiquity – and that is feminist.

Habitually viewed, feminist practice in the hierarchical art world, for example, means creating access, remaining open to others, and not classifying people according to class or background. For me, this also means insisting that artistic practice can be meaningful not only for the happy few, but rather for all of us. This means developing one's own artistic practice to that end and in exchange with others.

Here, the senses are the central concept for me. Art has a lot to do with perception, with training the senses, learning to see, and learning to hear. And it is therefore always also a form of self-transformation. This is where the potential of art lies for me. Rosa Luxemburg’s letters come to mind, which she wrote during her imprisonment during the First World War. There she observes and describes birds, insects, and plants. I think this is an important moment, even in this hopeless and externally determined situation, to sensitize the senses and the power of observation. We can only move forward if we advance.

I’ve worked on What is a Weapon? for three years. The work has taken form in this time, I would say. And there are both continuities and changes.

Even at the first exhibition at After the Butcher in the fall of 2020, the reliefs were installed in the room, but only pointed in two directions. At that point, I didn’t yet have any experience with wood carving, which gave the works a very immediate character. They were also quite unfinished. A relief showed a question from a university law exam and asked about the legal definition of a weapon – where it is important to note that a weapon can be both a weapon and not a weapon. I wanted to draw attention to §17a VersG through this contradiction.

For the second exhibition at very in Berlin-Wedding I worked with quite a lot of straw. The straw helped me to bring a space together where the large room was painted white and the adjoining space, with a lower ceiling, was painted black. In dialogue with Anna Zett, I decided not to show the text relief and to make the question What is a Weapon? the title. Besides the straw, the installation took up more space. There were additionally two series of self-carved spoons. I liked the contradiction between the title’s question and the many spoons in the exhibition, which refer to care, a life-sustaining activity.

I came across straw through my research on the application of §17a VersG. Although to my knowledge straw has never been discussed in court as a "passive weapon," I did find a case where straw was confiscated by the police in connection with protests by Ende Gelände² in the Rhineland. Straw is regularly used at protests in rural areas – in a potato sack it becomes a pillow and protects against moisture – very useful at protests in coal mines or on railroad tracks. It’s also useful to shield blows from the police.

Regarding the question of representation, I also liked straw very much as an artistic material because it cannot be represented by one of its individual components.

Exactly. They became displays for the series Benevolent Comrades, a series of carved spoons with collaged text. In addition to the spoons, there was also a relief with an index of handles as a new element. I took up this work with the NYC Handles in 2023 and developed it. It just occurred to me; we haven’t even talked about the relief!

The original idea was simple, I wanted to make shields, in the sense of the protective shield. And because I was keen on a simple and recyclable material, I came up with wood. Once I finally found the time after the first exhibition to go to museums and libraries and study the relief as a form, I quickly realized that the relief is a public art form. A great premise to continue working with it.

Somewhere I found a long conversation with Carl Andre, in which he speaks out very strongly against the relief – it’s subject to perspective, does not obey gravity, ignores the specificity of the material, and so on. So, in short, he described the relief as a dependent, ergo "female," medium. And that, in turn, I liked very much. Autonomy, L'art pour l'art, blablabla!

For the exhibition at MÉLANGE in Cologne, I developed a prototype for the wooden construction at alpha nova, a nine-part structure made of wooden connectors. I wanted to show the reliefs in space, at different heights and as a physical counterpart for the viewer. That didn’t work with the straw, because the pile of straw becomes the hurdle, not the relief.

Wooden plug-in connections were new to me, as you cut beams so that they can fit exactly into each other. These constructions can be assembled and disassembled and are a beautiful symbol of cooperation.

I came up with the color through the potato sacks from the exhibition the previous year. The color forms a wonderful contrast to the light lime wood. At the same time, bright orange is a signal color, which for me, however loosely, refers to public space.

At alpha nova there were two wooden constructions that were of varying heights and interlocked. I built the construction in the woodshop of the BBK with David Polzin. There are 29 pieces altogether, of which 21 each have two different ends. A challenging, rigorously geometric puzzle.

The structure bears eleven reliefs all together, which point in six directions. The viewer moves through the space and construction in order to see the reliefs. The installation emphasizes flatness as a property of the relief. When I see a relief from the front, I simultaneously see others from the side or from behind; distorted, cropped, or smooth. In this exhibition, there are two round and curved reliefs for the first time, on which the front and back sides are designed. They both depict street scenes and refer most directly to the form of the protective shield.

I will turn my focus to the diverse practices that individuals and social movements develop to appropriate public space and carry out protests. In particularl, I interested in an international perspective.To leave the exhibition space, I will show reliefs in public space. To this end, I will take a closer look at public space and examine how it is shaped and utilized outside of protests.

Otherwise, I am planning a work that is based on the form of the mold, which has been in use in Europe since the Middle Ages. These molds are negative flat reliefs in wood, which are used to produce series of Bildgebäck [bread or pastries in the shape of figurative representations]. I’m particularly interested in two aspects of this form of reproducible relief. On the one hand, the molds are usually works without an author, whose imprints, the Bildgebäcke, are not subject to the capitalist logic of exploitation of contemporary visual art. On the other hand, the aspect of edibility creates a direct link to the human body. The human body, its protection and well-being, in turn, are at the center of many social struggles.

An important aspect for me is the value that Bildgebäck brings to social practices, which are paradoxically rooted in these dated traditional practices.

During my research, I kept coming across photos in which demonstrators were holding up spoons. Spoons are rudimentary implements, belonging to the oldest known tools. The spoon imitates the curved hand – and shows a person life’s fundamental needs through their dependence on tools and care. And the fulfillment of these needs for all is what it's all about.

Talking with a friend, I learned that spoons are used to break up the pavement. To be able to defend oneself in the event of an attack. On one hand, the protesters stand up for the reproduction of (human) life. On the other hand, protesters with spoons symbolize the will to defend themselves. It’s a very strong image.