What the works have in common is that the concept derives from the intention of creating an analogy using imagined elements of mirrored modern business towers that then break up into strange, inorganic forms.

In this analogy, the modern business tower embodies the body of the oppressor, which invents itself through the particular fantasy of power. Straight lines and right angles dominate the geometry of the business tower, which is engineered to be administratively comprehensible. It is legible, repetitive, modular, stackable, and measurable. Through the reproduction of this geometry, space becomes something that can easily be organized, controlled, divided, and owned, as in colonial cartography, industrial monoculture farming, urban planning, etc.

Based on misinterpretations of the Bible (Genesis 1:26–28), the oppressor imagines itself to be made in the image of God and authorized to rule over the earth and its other inhabitants. Yet, in practice, highly complex systems are extremely hard to even partially predict or control. Thus, if the oppressor wants to prove its divinely ordained ability to dominate, it must find ways to make the organic world less complex. It hopes that through such a reduction, unexpected consequences arising from interactions between constituent parts of the whole are less likely, and the system becomes easier to govern. The straight line and the right angle therefore become the aesthetics of oppression.

Another important dimension is added by the reflective façade: it presents itself as immaculate while at the same time visually dissolving into its surroundings, becoming almost immaterial. The body that the oppressor has constructed for itself, too, is simultaneously there and denied. It uses its refusal of flesh, of being a creature among creatures, to position itself in proximity to divinity, as the default, as rationality, civilization, and progress. It is the body that gets to pretend it isn’t a body at all by distancing itself from nature.

Within this system, the oppressor categorizes the body of the oppressed as a deviation from its own. It is categorized as unnatural and perverted, ironically so, by attributing to it qualities associated with proximity to nature: disorderly, violent, dangerous, excessive, irrational, primitive, governed by emotion and instinct rather than reason, closer to an animal; ultimately uncivilized. This body is never just a body, but always already a symbol: a threat, an object of fascination, a mythical creature. To justify its subjugation without compromising its own morality, the oppressor has ‘scientifically’ measured and catalogued it. This body can never fully belong in the oppressor’s world. It will always remain a stranger to others and itself.

In the works, the imagined elements of the business tower have shifted in color, bent, cracked, and broken apart into complex organic structures. The reflective substance of the façades is swallowed by the process, revealing the supporting framework. Hunks of material form eroded, rock-like formations that protrude from the remnants of a rigid pattern; the structure dissolves. Highly artificial materials assume organic forms with a strange but appealing aesthetic. What was previously understood as a symbol of power is transformed into a new, indeterminate form.

Simplification could not completely succeed. Instead, the violent process of reduction created countless unforeseeable bifurcations, merely changing the conditions from which complexity emerges without actually preventing it. New collisions and relationships form, creating the conditions from which something new can emerge.

Rather than establishing a binary opposition between oppressor and oppressed or oppressor and nature, the analogy argues that these categories are already entangled. The oppressor cannot place itself outside the process. It becomes one of its components and, voluntarily or not, participates in the emergence of what it did not intend and could not foresee. Within the carefully engineered geometry of oppression lie the conditions for its own dissolution.

As the boundary between oppressor and nature dissolves, so too does the hierarchy between superior and inferior bodies. What was considered inferior is a condition of life itself. The oppressor, too, is only a part of an eternal process of emergence and decay.

This is where the analogy locates its message. To anyone marked as a deviation in the oppressor’s fantasy, the system may have been made extremely hostile. Its violence is immense, and its consequences devastating. But its apparent power does not amount to ultimate sovereignty. It can try to suppress and destroy, but it cannot ultimately determine what emerges. What appears to be an ending can become the condition for new forms of life and meaning.

Oppressive structures that appear immovable are themselves temporary configurations within a process vastly older than they are. Eventually, they too are subjected to the same forces of transformation that apply to everything else. Nothing that emerges within the whole can establish itself as the whole.

This is not a promise of an easy victory, but a reminder of hope.

The core of Sowe’s multimedia project is a partly autobiographical, research-based essay film, accompanied by abstract sculpture and installation. The film examines the effects of colonial power structures as well as questions of identity and belonging.

On the one hand, the project engages with Sowe’s personal history of growing up as an Afro-German in Germany during the 1990s, the so-called “baseball bat years,” a period marked by pogrom-like riots and targeted attacks against migrants. On the other hand, it draws inspiration from the history and legacy of his ancestors, the Fula from Futa Jallon in present-day Guinea-Conakry. A central historical reference is the resistance against French colonial expansion between 1889 and 1896.

The project is informed by Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). Like many African Americans, Angelou left the United States in 1962 and went to Ghana in search of a home, a stable sense of identity, and belonging. She came to realise, however, that Africa was not the home she had never known but could finally return to. She remained, in a sense, a stranger there, much as she was in the United States. Yet the experiences she gathered led to a transformed understanding of home and identity. Even though she did not find a home in Africa, she found, through Africa, a home within herself—a home she carried back to the United States and could share with others.

Attacks by racist mobs in Hoyerswerda, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Mölln, and Solingen stand as examples of the period in which Sowe grew up. Neo-Nazi violence was overt, while everyday racism and a broader rejection of migrants also shaped other parts of society in a pervasive way.

Sowe’s parents’ relationship was shaped by trauma and violence, and after they separated, he was placed in state custody in 1995 at the age of eight and grew up in a children’s home. This resulted in a largely self-reliant upbringing in an extremely hostile environment—hostile both in its structural conditions and in the meanings imposed onto his body.

The essay Sowe has begun addresses this experience of growing up as a Black person in a predominantly white, hostile environment, articulated through the metaphor of being born in the “belly of the beast.” The film traces the physical, emotional, and intergenerational consequences of systemic racism, violence, neglect, precarity, and social exclusion within a sick society. It examines the experience of a body marked as wrong or foreign. It shows how all these factors accumulate and lead to survival strategies that involve moral compromises.

In adulthood, Sowe re-established contact with his father and, in search of an alternative narrative of his identity, began engaging with the history and legacy of his ancestors. Their culture and their resistance to colonialism stand in contrast to the narratives of inferiority and helplessness he was told about. The people who settled in Futa Jallon built a complex social system that, in many aspects, was more advanced than that of the colonisers at the time. They also employed astute military resistance, strategic diplomacy, and regional alliances, including cooperation with the legendary Samori Touré, to delay and disrupt French control for nearly a decade.

The project is based on extensive research. Sowe has collected official records from his time in state custody, gathered information on the culture and resistance in Guinea, and documented personal memories. Further work includes archival research and the collection of visual material on the situation in Germany. Together with his father, Sowe will also travel to Futa Jallon to document historical sites, gather oral and written histories, and work with local communities. Institutional contacts with the Guinean Ministry of Youth and Information have been established to facilitate further research.