Within the early 1900s, the Pergamon Altar was reassembled—from fragments and conjecture—in Berlin, and the Pergamon Museum was constructed to border its grandeur. Right now, as conversations round restitution and the extractive logic of museums intensify, the altar’s presence within the German capital feels uneasy, its fractured mythology linked to bigger questions of show, possession, and the ability constructions that proceed to form Western establishments. “The Pergamon Altar, as probably the most monumental icons housed in Berlin, encapsulates so many layers of that authority: imperialism, myth-making, extraction, cultural pleasure, and supremacy,” Czebatul says. “It’s not simply an historical artefact; it’s an lively object—one which continues to form how we perceive European tradition and its historic legitimacy.”
As a result of ongoing renovation of the Pergamon Museum, the altar has not been accessible to the general public since 2014. Apart from a short go to, Czebatul labored with out entry to the monument itself. This absence, she says, turned a generative drive: “The closure creates a vacuum that invitations reinterpretation. With out the bodily altar and its museal presentation dictating how we should see it, there’s area to discover new readings. In All of the Attraction of a Rotting Gum, the altar is not a frozen image of triumph. It turns into porous and unstable—stuffed with rigidity. The closure turns into a possibility to deal with the altar not as an untouchable relic, however as a dwelling, shifting fragment of contested which means.”
