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Maria Hilf was built on the Welschenberg in 1652 and ordained as a sanctuary in 1661. It became a famous pilgrimage site after the Thirty Years War. The impressive church ruins remain, with the restored steeple and a small, open chapel.
  
In 2012, I traveled to Poznan, Poland at the invitation of the Mediations Biennale. While visiting an old shop, I asked what had been sold there formerly and I was told, “Hats for funerals”. This surprised me, as I had never heard of such a shop before. An idea started working in my head. Half a year later I suddenly visualized my next installation: a funeral procession with the participants replaced by only their black hats, floating at different heights. When thinking about a location, the beautiful ruined church on the Welschenberg came to my mind.
I collected many black hats to realize my idea, selecting different styles of men and women’s hats. I sewed invisible thread through each hat and fixed a black wooden bead on either side. Then I connected the threads to a cord to carry the hats. On site, we attached a stone on one end of the cord and threw it from inside the room through a lateral upper window opening. With a second cord we repeated this. With the prepared hats on both cords we threw the ends, again with a stone, through the opposite window opening. As we pulled the ends of the cords from the exterior wall, the hats inside the room rose and appeared to float. Many thanks to all those who helped me realizing this!
The site retains a sacred nature, with simultaneous qualities of interior and exterior space. The hats float down from an imaginary ceiling and show up in graphic formations against the open sky, at once geometrical and playful. The hats add a new black element to the color triad of brickwork, grass floors, and the vault of blue sky. They throw shadows on the sunlit parts of the masonry. The different types of hats share the common color and the slow motion spinning and oscillation. The wind plays with the hats, softly turning and swinging them, making them look different in every moment. During the day, light wanders and creates shadows in various places.
The number of hats hints at the internal volume of the space: they float therein like souls, the viewpoint upward to the sky.
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