Madele's Journey
The baby floats upon the water, dreaming to herself of those things of which babies dream. Lighter than the element which carries her along, alone and adrift upon the tides, Madele is a long way from home.
“She is the soul of young Africa, the baby soul,” says the artist who brought her into being, Ernst Handl. “She's helpless in one way and perfect in another, but she isn't being well-treated by the rest of the world.”
Named for the daughter of a cotton-farmer, whose three syllable appellation struck Handl as a “very simple, cute” name, baby Madele (pronounced “Mah-day-la”) stands five meters tall on the tips of her delicate toes. To meet her in person is to be graced by the presence of a true beauty: an outsized, intensely fragile, imaginatively symbolic creation, sculpted from polystyrene and painted with love.
One of the longtime instigators of the scene at the legendary Berlin venue, S036, Handl has been using art to change people’s perceptions of social realities for decades. These days, his principal fascination is “collective art”: specifically, how group consciousness expresses itself in sculpture or painting co-created by as many as 800 people. “I want to bring out the inner images,” he explains, “to find out what societies are really thinking.”
Madele, though a creation solely of Handl’s hands, is one such “inner image”. On Sunday morning, she drifted beneath the Oberbaumbrücke where, in former times, the shadow of a wall fell on water flowing freely, upstream and down. Passing over the invisible barrier by which, for 28 years, the people of one side of this city were forcibly separated from the other, Madele floated midway on the waves, before continuing on her journey, drifting off downstream…
Within moments, however, her childish reverie was rudely interrupted by the grating roar of petrol-pumping engines revving higher. Wakeboarding to glory behind powerboats hammering at pace, seven men and one woman were racing down the river. The surf was up; the adrenaline coursing. This was the Super-Elite of Eight’s Big Day Out.
So what’s really going on here? What are we truly to make of the vision of a giant African baby-girl floating above the waves, as the so-called leaders of the so-called free world glide idly by? A performance-art piece? An allegory? Or another mode of resistance, one made of beauty and creativity and imagery to challenge conventional perceptions. “The resistance of our day should be different,” Handl tells me…
“I’m very inspired to give it different expressions, different images, because it is different. We have to use other weapons. If it’s the same old throwing stones and burning cars, nothing will change. There is still the power against the system. There is helplessness in the face of big institutions. In one way I‘m also helpless, but I try to get a discussion going between both sides. Because, on the other side, there’s also a helplessness. I realize it every time I work with big companies. They’re looking for values. They’re looking for directions. They’re like children that way.”
While a baby from humanity’s own cradle might raise a question or two about human civilizational maturity in the age of global interconnectedness, Madele doesn’t need to come begging for your acknowledgement. She already has it. She's simply too big, too beautiful and too evocative to ignore.
So where is she now? Last I heard, she was heading in the direction of Heiligendamm, towards what future destiny and place of belonging only time can tell.
