Marko Lehanka

In summer 2007 a roughly seven-metre-high talking flower with surfboards for petals sprouted from the asphalt of Münster’s old marketplace, Prinzipalmarkt. Mounted in the centre of the flower were a monitor and a loudspeaker. Absurd stories featuring local Münster protagonists issued from the speaker and could at the same time be read on the screen. Small booklets were also available, containing sample stories translated into all standard languages as well as into the regional Hessian dialect: “What happened on 1 March 2007 in Münster and what role did black Marko, location: Drubbel, play in it?”¹ Lehanka had developed software that randomly combined the names of persons and places taken from the local phone book and associated them with current climatic conditions, so that the stories contained both fictitious and real aspects. But all the stories ended in death in some form. Steeped in Lehanka’s black humour, the project illustrated the complex functioning of language: the simplification of rhetoric by “atomising”² language into “almost structural categories”³ belied the elaborate programming of the software. Only via their apparent banality did the seriousness of the themes addressed in the stories emerge.

Elena Winkler

¹ Excerpt from the brochure accompanying Blume für Münster.

² Michael Mundig, “Arrest the Unforeseen”. In: Brigitte Franzen, Kasper König and Carina Plath (eds.), skulptur projekte münster 07, exhib. cat. LWL-Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, Cologne 2007, p. 143.

³ Ibid.