There is something so fraternising when we all sit together and eat sunflower seeds.

In 2019 few other artists and I decided to work collaboratively on the topic of public pools. We built a pool stage in our studio at the university for our annual open doors. Next to working on the pool each of us worked on an individual project. I created Haufen in this context. The German word Haufen translates to pile. The symbolism behind a pile denotes the attitude of clumping together a multitude of different cultural experiences experienced by different ethnic groups.

The Pankow open-air public swimming pool as a place where different cultural practices meet, it inspired the selection of the sunflower seed as sujet. Haufen is a work that contains a symbiosis of different cultures that fraternise with each other in their otherness. The otherness is created by the dominating majority (unconsciously) ascribing an otherness to the minority societies.

In this process of othering, there is a loss of differentiation between the individual cultures, which at the same time allows them to unite with each other.