Raphaela Vogel
Ab jetzt wird durchgeblüht:
Music for Anrainer of Airports
Exhibition September 6 – October 18, 2025
Part of DC Open
Düsseldorf Cologne Open Galeries
September 5 – 7, 2025
www.dc-open.de
Anna Meinecke on Raphaela Vogel at gallerytalk.net: Best of DC Open Köln 2025
Georg Imdahl on Raphaela Vogel at FAZ: Das Rheinland fördert neue Kunst zutage – DC Open
Alexandra Wach on Raphaela Vogel at Monopol: Jetzt wird durchgeblüht – DC Open
To begin with the little surprise in the end, the punch line. In order to understand what she is reciting, we need to dig into historical documents of the history of the German antifa and German punk rock, which happen to be, in fact, juridical documents.
In November 2000, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled in favor of a complainant convicted under Section 90a of the German Criminal Code for defaming the state and its symbols. The conviction stemmed from playing Hamburg punk band Slime’s 1981 song Deutschland muss sterben (…damit wir leben können) at a 1997 rally in Berlin-Kreuzberg, held in support of another person imprisoned for the same act. The complainant argued that the conviction violated his fundamental right to artistic freedom under Article 5, Paragraph 3 of the Basic Law. The court agreed, holding that the prosecution infringed upon this right and emphasizing that the song Deutschland muss sterben is a striking, drastic critique with a satirical edge of social and political conditions in Germany.”
In its reasoning, the court drew a historical parallel to Heinrich Heine’s 1846 poem The Silesian Weavers, a work censored in Prussia after its Paris publication under the editorial influence of Karl Marx. The judges also emphasized the resonance of the song’s title: a direct inversion of the inscription on the so-called Kriegsklotz, a Nazi-era war memorial erected in 1934 at Hamburg-Dammtor by sculptor Richard Kuöhl. The limestone block bears a frieze of marching soldiers beneath the words, “Deutschland muss leben, und wenn wir sterben müssen” (“Germany must live, even if we must die”), taken from Heinrich Lersch’s poem Soldatenabschied. What was not lost on the judges was the reversal in meaning in Slime’s lyrics–transforming a militaristic call to sacrifice into a radical critique of nationalism.
Raphaela Vogel’s engagement with this reference should not be read as an attempt to anchor her work in historical provenance or within the discourse of appropriation, but rather as an example of how fragments of signification are metabolized and reoriented within her practice, which favors subjective self-referentiality. Her strategy recalls what Louis Althusser, drawing on Bertolt Brecht, described as décalage—a formal shift that destabilizes established signification and forces a rethinking of symbols, images, and language. (It is worth noting that Brecht’s only film, Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehört die Welt?, was coincidentally shot on the Großer and Kleiner Müggelsee, close to Vogel’s home in Eichwalde, the plot is set at a workers camping ground, which still exists to this day, but has moved even closer to Vogel’s place.) Like in Brecht’s theatre, where laconic twists and turns and surprising ontological shifts prevent the audience’s immersion in illusion, Vogel’s films, paintings, and installations hinge on discontinuities, contradictions, and shifts of register—between narrative and commentary, action and interruption, representation and reflection.
Slime’s song resurfaces in Vogel’s work following a long, kaleidoscopic video shot from the perspective of her son Bo’s train set. It’s accompanied by her own music, performed partly on the church organ in Eichwalde. This is the only surviving so-called Parabrahm-organ—an effect-oriented type of instrument that combined a harmonium with a traditional organ and was part of a late 19th-century impressionist fashion in organ construction. The style was strongly rejected by the puritanical Orgelbewegung (“organ movement”) of the 20th century, which sought a return to a pre-Bach organ culture. Vogel uses this instrument—alongside other devices—to produce a post-Krautrock, semi-ambient atmospheric musical style. Its tone veers sharply away from the aggressive immediacy of the original punk-song.
Similarly, when she reimagines the VOX television logo as a phallic glyph painted in the style of Edvard Munch (or is it Alphonse Mucha?), or when the cover art of the British crust punk band Electro Hippies’ album The Only Good Punk… (Is a Dead One) appears above one of the twisted figures inhabiting her coffin-shaped canvases; these quotations function less as appropriations than as estrangements that sew in discontinuity. We can’t even get past the title of the exhibition without a sly reference to Brian Eno’s 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports—a nod that ironically self-refers to Vogel and her family’s proximity to the BER airport. As Vogel says in her own words:
“Brian Eno dreamed of airports as if they were living rooms, sanctuaries of stillness, where sound would hover like furniture in a space. But here, the dream collapses into irony. Even in stillness, the airport hum resists becoming furniture—it insists on being fate.
The airport is Germany: calm in theory, brutal in reality. But privileges must die so movement can live. Only then does the waiting hall become a threshold to freedom.”
Nicholas Tammens, August 2025
Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG), Beschluss vom 3. November 2000, Az. 1 BvR 581/00, accessed September 2, 2025, Bundesverfassungsgericht: https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidungen/DE/2000/11/rk20001103_1bvr058100.html