Every year, Vitra invites renowned architecture and design agencies to decorate its large showroom windows for three weeks. Each day, about 40,000 drivers and passers-by can view the various presentations while waiting for the traffic lights to change – hence the exhibition’s name, “Ampelphase”, or “traffic signal phase”. Contributing to this year’s “Ampelphase”, that takes the concept of “Heimat” or “home country” as its central theme, Atelier Markgraph has designed a tongue-in-cheek installation. “Heimat” is a paradoxical phenomenon; we may think of it as a real place, but once we try to grasp it we find an imaginary construct instead. As part of “Ampelphase 8”, the HEIMATGENERATOR depicts this process in a playful way by (re)generating notions of “Heimat” interactively.
The generator resembles an outsize cuckoo clock, which represents a German cliché in itself. Upon closer inspection, the “clock” turns out to be a collage of numerous objects and images reflecting individual impressions of “Heimat” that were collected in a field research project beforehand. Using the QR code on the clock’s central display, passers-by can activate the HEIMATGENERATOR by smartphone and call up images of “Heimat” from the generator’s data base. Subsequently, the machine then conjures up surprising combinations and personalised short film montages that indulge “Heimat” stereotypes while simultaneously reflecting on their origins, and hence send messages as contradictory as the concept itself.