A few years ago, I saw Felix Gmelin’s video piece Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II, in an exhibition in Berlin. In it, the artist restages a film by Gerd Conrad from 1968, which shows runners carrying a large red flag through the streets of Berlin in a relay run, which ends with the final runner brandishing the flag from the balcony of the city hall of West Berlin to the shock and outrage of passers-by. One of the runners in the piece was Gmelin’s father, a radical filmmaker and theorist. In an almost identical re-shoot of the film in 2002 Gmelin has his students at the Stockholm art academy carry a red flag through the streets of Stockholm, where they also run towards and enter the city hall, but this time without the triumphant finale on the balcony.

During my stay at Homebase in Pankow, I reflect on what it might mean for me, as an artist who grew up in the Eastern Bloc, to re-enact the run for a third time, in this area, which housed important institutions of the East German state as well as being home to its elites. While making a flag, and as I stake out a possible route along different sites connected to Pankow’s pre-89 history, I struggle to decide whether or not I should re-stage the run here.