Built a month ago on the edge of the Tiergarten, Berlin's central park, the monument in honor of the homosexual victims of the Holocaust is causing tense debate among the artistic and political classes. The project's creators accuse the government of homophobic intervention in the project and ruining the initial idea.
In a report published in Foha de São Paulo this Friday (27/06), the Danish Michael Elmgreen, who signed the project together with his partner, Ingar Dragset, said that they did not want an abstraction "like pink triangles ".
Inside the monument's concrete tombstones, there is a small crack where a video of two men kissing is shown. "We wanted an explicit image", reveals Elmgreen. The controversy reached its climax when the German Minister of Culture, Bernd Neumann, censored the invitation to the inauguration, the reason being an image with two men kissing. In place of the illustration, there was a gray card without any image.
Alice Shwarzer, a German feminist, made another criticism, saying that a memorial that only deals with gay men ignores lesbians who also suffered from Nazi persecution. When defining the work, she classified it as "kitsch" (art without content that borders on tacky) and "phallic" (referring to the phallus, the penis, essentially masculine). After a lot of pressure from feminist groups, it was decided that every two years the video will be changed.
Regarding this, artist Thomas Vinterberg said that art is subjective and "it is never possible to reach a collective agreement regarding art". The film created by the artist was recorded in the same location as the monument, as if it were an extension of the concrete work and for the artist to change the video would destroy the original idea of the project.
The memorial in honor of gays was approved under the previous administration, which was from the Green Party, the current administration is from the Christian Democrats, which is conservative and allied with the Catholic church's discourse, "they support the pope, they don't want to see two men kissing ", says Elmgreen about political meddling in the project. She also said that she will never participate in public projects again, as she claimed that they (politicians) do not understand art, only politics, "artists should be protected, not manipulated", says Vinterberg.
