Nollmeridianen
Photographic series, 35 mm.
2016-2022.
1979, in the front garden of Schloss Bellevue, 66 statues are being excavated from the ground, 26 full body statues and 40 busts. They were the remaining marble bodies out of the original 96 that in 1901 were ordered for Siegesallee in Tiergarten as a gift to the German people by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Depicting all 32 Brandenburg-Prussian rulers, surrounded by two renowned persons from their time, bishops, scientists or artists. An unwanted gift it seems, made famous by the name The Puppenallee, and when some of them started to appear weather-beaten and mutilated, a new name was invented, Neue Invalidenstrasse.
The statues had been buried in the post-war Germany, during an action to save them from the rubble mountain created by the Allies during the project know as zero hour, a reduction of imperial symbols and an exorcism of the phantoms of the past. In the middle of the night they carried away the statues from their spot in Siegesallee to the place where they were buried, the garden of Schloss Bellevue. It would take another 25 years until the statues resurfaced and were brought back into existence.
Since the resurrection of the statues they have been situated in a museal limbo. Nollmeridianen has the intention to investigate this zero point and to have a closer look at these spectral figures that has been moved over the line. Those who were not supposed to be saved for the future had returned again, placed somewhere in-between a statue and a discarded object.
© Joel Danielsson & Louise Öhman