At the end of August 2021 a proposal was submitted for the art-for-architecture competition for the building of the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office) on Kreuzstrasse in Berlin. The concept is a mural design on two red brick walls that face one another.
The Auswärtiges Amt is a whole that consists of many parts. It is a complex of numerous and varied functions. Some of the functions are combined in the building to which an artistic contribution is to be made here. Some of them, however, are decentralised functions distributed across the whole world. The bridge between the internal and the external characterises the work of the Auswärtiges Amt. The tasks are within and without. Highly qualified people live and work within and without, making their contribution to the whole. The Auswärtiges Amt is thus an “office from inside to outside” or an “outward-facing office”.
Within and without is the theme of the artistic concept. To be more precise: the variety of the people and the tasks inside, and the variety of the people and the tasks outside. The “within” is represented by a central element that fills the contour of the A (for Auswärtiges Amt) with individual sections that stand for the diverse functions. In this way, the “here” and the “there on location” are interpreted on several visual levels. The outside is represented by a visual correspondence, by individual sections that form a spherical periphery and relate to the centre. The spherical representation of the elements suggests locations that are scattered across the globe. Relationships to other nations appear in the antithesis of the colours. While the inside is composed of the German colours, the outside is formed from the colours of nations worldwide.
The two facing walls differ through their perspectives. On one wall appears a view from above of the northern hemisphere and a section of the A, showing the upper part of the image of this letter. Conversely, on the other wall there appears a view from below of the southern hemisphere and a section of the A that visualises the lower part of the letter. Thus the two walls reveal the same interpretative principle, but without repetition. Different points of view and different perspectives demonstrate that for us there is not only one single view of the world. The impression created by the two walls is based on the liveliness of plurality.