Lars Laumann
* 1977 in Brønnøysund (no), lives and works in Oslo (no)

Berlinmuren
2008, Video installation, 27 min, color, sound, loop

Lars Laumann’s latest film centers on a highly unusual relationship: the love affair between Eija-Riita Berliner-Mauer and the Berlin Wall. Their relationship, which Mrs. Berliner-Mauer explicitly describes as sexual and emotional, began in the 1960s. By 1979, the two were joined in matrimony, complete with a wedding ceremony and invitation cards. The events of 1989—which included the partial destruction and demolition of the Berlin Wall—were nothing less than traumatic for the “wife” who still considers November 9, 1989, the day the Wall “fell,” the saddest day of her life. Berliner-Mauer now lives in Liden in northern Sweden where, besides running a museum that displays models of guillotines and the Berlin Wall, she moderates a number of websites about the Wall and the phenomenon of human love for objects. The scientific term for this kind of relationship is objectophilia, although Berliner-Mauer calls it “Objectúm-sexuality.” She maintains that objects and things have the ability to love and have feelings; the object of her affection is therefore not a mere fetish but an equal partner.
Laumann’s film is comprised of photographs and film footage of Berliner-Mauer herself, background material on the Berlin Wall, and accounts of people who love the railroad bridges, the Eiffel tower, ghetto blasters, cars, and other things. His approach is not primarily documentary but is guided instead by a respectful interest in the idiosyncrasies of marginalized social phenomena—not only that such relationships are possible in modern popular culture, but also how society reacts to them. Specially screened for the biennial on a plot of land that had been cleared in the postwar period for the building of the Wall, Laumann’s intriguing homage to how one woman “learned to love the Wall” finds an apt home in the ad-hoc cinema structure partially constructed from the debris found on the site today.