Hans Martin Fleischer’s main job is as a PR-manager for the municipality of Berlin. This year, he will spend all his annual leave, amounting to six weeks, travelling around Ukraine. He brought a foam-made installation of the famous Berlin Wall with him, allowing anyone to leave an inscription or a drawing there.
The idea to create this unusual exhibit occurred to Fleischer about 10 years ago. The German resident wanted to convey to other people the essence of political events in Berlin, so he made a half-size foam copy of the Wall’s fragment and started travelling with it throughout Europe. He later decided to slightly change the idea of the project to make it more interactive, so that people themselves could participate in coloring the Wall.
He explains his ongoing visit to Ukraine by the fact that current events in this country, now forcibly divided, display strong similarities to what happened in Germany. In addition, he decided to mark two events in one go – the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1st anniversary of the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine. Fleischer believes that his copy of the Wall should remind Europeans that the peace consolidation is not over yet. “I think this is a very important symbol. I was 26 in the 1980s, when the Wall fell, but everyone was saying immediately before it happened that the division was there to stay for a long time, perhaps for more than a century. Therefore, no one expected that the Wall that divided Germany would be destroyed so quickly. This is why I see it as the most important experience in my life,” Fleischer said. He revealed to us that he kept at home three original pieces of the Wall that had divided the two German states, West Germany and East Germany, until the end of the 1980s.
The German guest has traveled around the world with this installation for years, and he launches it into the water every time he finds himself in a new country. According to the traveler, he feels there is some sort of symbolism to his idea. The water, in his opinion, unites everything in this world. What seemed impossible yesterday becomes quite humanly doable over time, whose flow is similar to the flow of the river. In the case of Ukraine, Fleischer is sure that the obstacles that exist today on our road to peace will sooner or later collapse. During his stay in our country, the artist visited troops stationed in Sloviansk and spent some time in Kyiv. After Dnipropetrovsk, he will visit Odesa and Uzhhorod.
Fleischer first visited this country five years ago. As he came to Dnipropetrovsk in winter this time, he set his installation on the ice instead of launching it into the water, marking his first such experience. During the setup, the Berliner refused all offers of help, citing the need to maintain the “purity of the experiment,” as it is a one-man project.
