The Life Story of Cornelius Johnson’s Olympic Oak and Other Matters of Survival

23. Oktober 2018, 18.00 Uhr Domgasse 1, Großer Seminarraum, Experimentelle Gestaltung, 2. OG

Die Experimentelle Gestaltung lädt zum Vortrag von Christian Kosmas Mayer.

Im Rahmen der gemeinsamen Gastvortragsreihe der BiKu wurd Christian Kosmas Mayer seine Arbeit "The Life Story of Cornelius Johnson’s Olympic Oak and Other Matters of Survival“ vorstellen.

In his work „The Life Story of Cornelius Johnson’s Olympic Oak and Other Matters of Survival“, Christian Kosmas Mayer deals with one of the „Olympic Oaks“, little potted oak plantlets that were given to all gold medal winners of the 1936 Olympic Games that were organized by the Nazis in Berlin. Cornelius Johnson, gold medal winner in high jump, was the Games’ first Afro-American champion that was awarded with one of these trees, and Adolf Hitler left the stadium to avoid a handshake with Johnson after the ceremony. 80 years later, Mayer started searching for this tree in Los Angeles and found it in the backyard of Johnson’s former parental home, today inhabited by a Mexican family in the multi-cultural district of „Koreatown“. As part of his artistic work, the artist later created small offsprings of this oak in a laboratory and brought them to Europe, where they were presented in-vitro next to texts and images representing the history of their mother tree. This way, the work connected history with an animate present and a future, that is still open and undecided.