C'mon, Follow Me Across the Rainbow and I'll Show You the Way to the Dream Valley
approaches populism as an affective and narrative technology rather than a fixed ideology. The installation examines how promises of belonging, clarity, and redemption are constructed through familiar cultural forms, and how these promises gain force by appearing playful, benign, and emotionally reassuring.
The work consists of a herd of enlarged, hand-built figures derived from children's popular culture. Positioned at human scale and without pedestals, the sculptures occupy the same physical and ethical space as the viewer. Their bright colors, soft contours, and recognizable forms invite proximity and trust, allowing affect to precede interpretation and drawing viewers into the work before its ideological structures become apparent.
At its core, the installation investigates how populist rhetoric mobilizes desire and insecurity through simplified narratives of identity. Leadership is framed as care, guidance as salvation, and submission as collective strength. The promise of a Dream Valley echoes recurring mythic structures of a lost innocence, a corrupted present, and a future imagined as recoverable through unity and obedience. Complex social anxieties are translated into emotionally legible stories that divide the world into moral absolutes.
Material vulnerability is central. Cracks, seams, and traces of the hand remain visible, emphasizing emotional fragility over ideological certainty. Damage appears as condition rather than spectacle, pointing toward fear, shame, and uncertainty as forces that seek resolution through collective identification and the projection of blame.
The herd structure foregrounds the negotiation between individuality and group orientation. Authority emerges not through coercion, but through alignment, imitation, and shared affect. Persuasion operates through promise rather than force, sustained by repetition, recognition, and emotional resonance.
Employing satire without ridicule, the work resists moral superiority. Humor and charm lower defenses while sharpening perception. Rather than instructing the viewer what to think, the installation invites recognition of how reassurance can replace responsibility, and how hope may be redirected into exclusionary forms.
The work functions as a space of reflection on contemporary political imagination. It asks how societies come to accept simplified solutions to complex conditions, and how early learned cultural models continue to shape ethical orientation in adulthood. Rather than offering an external critique, it turns inward, addressing the emotional infrastructures that make such narratives possible and persistent.
[C'mon, Follow Me Across the Rainbow and I'll Show You the Way to the Dream Valley. Height at the withers varies from ca. 60 cm to ca. 90 cm. Stoneware, engobes, clear glaze, pearl lustre, horsehair, silk. 1200 °C, oxygen, 2022.]
93 332,40 € (+ tax 10%)