Haustod


To understand this installation´s high level of improbability and why it excessively celebrated a building´s destruction one has to know how this came about. Shortly before the 800th anniversary of the city of Gießen (Hesse) its administration decided that due to contamination their recent city hall had to get demolished. With the simple but catchy phrase “Imagine that for its jubilee a city blasts its own town hall” a group of local drama experts hit the nail on the head. The idea went incredibly viral, newspapers were full and expectations high. While the toxic load made a public detonation unthinkable inevitably something had to happen as culmination of the jubilee. At least a virtual blast had to be served to the hungry crowd. So the projection Haustod mapped 3D simulations of the city hall´s “death” onto its own wall and visualized several ways how to “finish” this building. At the celebration the audience got in a frenzy of enthusiasm – until the animation started to loop and it became more and more clear that what they were seeing was all they would get that night. Anyhow the blast of their own city hall has become an integral part of Gießen´s collective memory.