The Siegessäule Souvenir is an unlimited edition by Aura Rosenberg produced by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. "For an exhibition
of this work at the daadgalerie, I decided to commission a baked
version of the victory column. First, I planned to give the baker a
souvenir of the monument to copy. However, searching through tourist
shops and antique markets yielded nothing. At the victory column
itself only souvenirs of the golden angel that sits at its top were
for sale. Curiously, the base of the victory column houses an
exhibition of models of monuments from around the world—in sharp to
contrast its own souvenir-less status. In response, I produced a
small edition of victory columns. They were ten inches tall and based
on the original version, before Hitler's enlargement. They served as
prototypes for a subsequent edition of 1000 that I made for the 2004
Berlin Biennale.
The word 'souvenir' derives from Latin 'subvenir', which translates
'to come up from below'—virtually the same as its meaning in French.
Souvenirs are a way of remembering, holding on to memories, so that
they remain present. The absence of a victory column souvenir
suggests the opposite—a desire to repress not only memories of the
monument, but also its troubling past. As far as I know, my edition
may be the only group of Siegessäule souvenirs available anywhere.
Only Die Siegessäule, Berlin's leading gay and lesbian magazine,
deigns to acknowledge this symbol, admittedly with a degree of irony.
My desire to produce an edition of souvenirs is not so much a
celebration of the monument as it is a way to confront its traumatic
history." -- artists statement