805,847 – that’s how many people visited the German capital in 2017.
Tourists from all over the world move through Berlin and encounter various architectural styles and monuments from many different and in some cases long gone eras, which are characterized by changing socio-political systems and are subject to a permanent change in perception and meaning. But isn't a monument much more than an art object erected in the course of a historical event or leader to remind todays viewer of a certain person or a current event? "If you where the statue what would you say" is intended to show that a monument is not only a witness of the past but also of current cultural events and developments due to the very different ways of reception that viewers from all over the world have when they see it. The construction of information and meaning of a monument is an individual process of thinking that usually remains hidden from others. With our short film we tried to make this process visible: Every participant in the film was given the opportunity to make the Marx and Engels monument speak, by writing down whichever quote they wanted onto big speech bubbles and thus to share a small part of their own perception process with us. The filled speech bubbles, that are just as different in their content as their viewers are themselves, show us the enormous cultural diversity, but also the socio-political differences with which we are confronted with today.
