Free Mumia

What exactly do people look at summer resorts, where their savings plan is for annual leave? What they do there? It could be about pleasant emotions, extraordinary sensations and functional free action, the exemption of duty and subordination, the experience of freedom, or what is being spent. It is possible to acquire a crazy hat. Successfully acquired a crazy hat is in Blackpool, England, an eccentricity, with which it stands not alone. It is the most extraordinary hat, one that no one would have previously can imagine, and yet carry it in the moment when someone declares it to be particularly crazy hat, all already. No one can name the exact date on which any of the crazy hat has become the fashion, who as what it all now. That would be a case for Mass Observation. Last year was the mad hat a man-sized crab plush that you strapped on your back, more precisely, which is strapped on Saturday evening all on their backs. This year there is an orange cone made ​​of fabric with white horizontal stripes, like those plastic hats, which they labeled accidents. So hat and information signs at the same time. Look here: a hat!

Excerpt from Katha Schultes: "These stood to delight and stare" - Mass-Observation in Blackpool, Lancashire

The essay is part of this publication.

This catalogue is published on occasion of the exhibition Nina Könneman, Free Mumia, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (March 28 – May 17, 2009).