It is common courtesy to wipe one’s feet upon entering someone’s home. The usual manner is to scrape vehemently one’s shoe on a rough surface, to free it from the filth and dirt of the outdoor world. Four letters, carefully stencilled in navy colours on a series of doormats, form the name of the northernmost point in Germany. Sylt, a small island cherished by summer tourists, is more and more an exclusive destination for the German upper-class, particularly for polo tournament enthusiasts. Over the years, the real estate market has reached unprecedented peaks, and luxurious holiday villas are progressively taking over local family homes.

Mood-boards mirroring a lifestyle, the Polo pieces were specially conceived for the entrance hall of a building in a resolutely different hotspot: Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel. At the heart of a sector marked by gentrification, on the edge of the city’s skyline and only metres away from small commerces, the red-light district, and homeless shelters, the works suddenly invoke questions of accessibility. The doormat becomes a gate, a filter between worlds—upstairs, the sleek and wealthy interior of a recently upgraded apartment, outside, the effervescence of a multicultural working and lower class. Beneath the coded surface of the pieces lie tensions spanning between the cultivation of privilege and its reliance on social, cultural and spatial appropriation.

Text: Isabelle Tondre 

POLO, Coconut Mat, Print on Plexiglass, Grating
POLO, Coconut Mat, Print on Plexiglass, Grating
POLO, Coconut Mat, Print on Plexiglass, Grating
POLO, Coconut Mat, Print on Plexiglass, Grating