Ornament und Verbrechen

Ornament and Crime consisted of two large-scale billboards installed at the intersection of Potsdamer Straße and Kurfürstenstraße in Berlin, a site whose street names still recall the feudal and monarchical structures that shaped Prussian history. The work featured a portrait of Captain Hendrik Witbooi, leader of the Nama resistance against German colonial occupation in present-day Namibia.

The image, sourced from the Colonial Image Archive in Frankfurt am Main, was digitally altered to reproduce the colour and texture of the surrounding brick architecture. Blending into the façade that supported it, the portrait appeared and disappeared simultaneously, echoing the marginal presence of colonial histories within contemporary German public space.

The title references Adolf Loos' influential 1908 essay Ornament and Crime. Written during the same period as the German colonial wars in Namibia and shortly after Witbooi's death in combat, the text has long occupied a canonical position within architectural discourse. The project re-examined this legacy by drawing attention to the racialized language embedded in Loos' writings and to the broader relationship between modern architecture, colonial ideology and systems of representation.

Placed at the intersection of street names commemorating aristocratic power, the reappearance of Witbooi's portrait introduced a counter-narrative into Berlin's symbolic landscape. The work questioned which histories remain visible, which are overlooked, and how architecture, urban nomenclature and public space continue to participate in the construction of historical memory.