Raphaela Vogel
Found Subject

There are barely any traces of Jewish-German writer Erich Hopp (1888-1949). Together with his family, he hid from the Nazis in the same building that the artist inhabits as of recently. It was built in 1930 by architect Richard Iwan – little is known about him and his ambitious projects between Bauhaus and Californian Modernism as well. Floorplans, letters from the architect, a song (Tango), written by Hopp in 1930, cues about his work as a director in a workers theatre of the 1920s, a book of psalms written by him from the underground and his memoir, published in the US in 1947, in which he recounts experiencing hunger and cold in their hiding place. These materials, austere and moving at the same time, form the basis of Raphaela Vogel’s imagination turned installation. The intersection of architectural modernism, German fascism and antisemitism, as well as the transformation of despair into spiritual hope are her points of departure. Raphaela Vogel’s film dissects the house into utopian ornaments. Hopp’s ambivalent psalm resounds while monstrous agricultural machines tie the scene together. Footage from the everyday lives of survivors and dialectical images showing progress collapsing into terror, an inhumane humanism, frame those ‘found subjectivities’ in the adjacent rooms. The artist offers four possible points of access to the destiny of others in geometric terms: centrality/diameter – being affected, victim, fighter, refugee, in hiding / secant – people in solidarity, who take risks for the sake of others / tangent – those who are empathetically touched and remain in their world / passant – no connection