I chose to explore the theme of protection from two different sides: the comfortable, secure feeling I get when at home and the idea of feeling watched and monitored, of loosing all sense of privacy. While I associate the first one with very positive emotions, as one would usually connect to the word protection, I wanted to challenge this by incorporating the compromises we willingly and unwillingly have to make in order to be what the government calls “protected”.
For me, my home in Germany is a place where I feel secure and ‘protected’. This is where I have my largest support network, where my family and my friends are always there for me. In Hamburg, the city I grew up in, I know every shop, every park and every tree within, every street and everyone. The combination of all of these factors is what makes me feel so comfortable, because everything is familiar and I know there won’t be any negative surprises. Especially in a ginormous city like New York, where I don’t have any family and barely see any familiar faces on the street, this contrast between feeling protected and feeling lost becomes very clear. Even though I could not feel more at home in New York, I will never feel as protected as I do when at home.
Growing up right next to a forest, nature, the green, and especially large trees have always been very present in my life. Although we moved away from the forest when I was 12, still today when I look outside of my window in Hamburg, all I can see is the saturated green of the up to 20m high trees. During the summer months, they protect my room from the bright and hot sun rays, when I change in my room the leaves protect me from the sight of my neighbors, during the winter months, the streets protect us from the cold and icy wind that comes in from the sea and when walking around the city, it is the trees that protect me from the endless amount of rain we have in Germany.
As my home is in Germany and my family is German, I decided to put German words to express the emotions I feel when thinking about home. German is still the language I feel most comfortable in and that I have the richest vocab in. It reminds me of home and it makes me somewhat nostalgic whenever I meet someone in New York that I can speak German to. The words I chose mean the following:
Familie: family
Hafen: harbor; not understood in a literal sense, but more a synonym for home; to drop anchor in the harbor is to come back home; Hamburg (city where I am from) has one of the world’s largest harbors, which is why it is an even more important element of home for me
Ruhe: rest, silence, peace; peace of mind = protected, protected from stress and worries; also a characteristic of my home especially when compared to the busy New York City
Heimat: home, hometown, natural habitat; no literal translation; home is probably the word that comes closest to its meaning, but it is much more than that, it is more about ones origin, where, in which culture and how one grew up, ones tradition and values
Geborgenheit: security; again no literal translation; about the security you feel your family gives you, the feeling of being well taken care of, of living in your own little nest, your happy world
Natur: nature
beschuetzt: protected, literal translation as well as a much more familiar definition of it; more a word you would use to describe your father or your older brother taking care of you rather than the police protecting you
Fuersorge: care; knowing someone cares and someone would do everything for you, someone is there for you
Obhut: care; also translated to care but more about someone giving you a home; taking care of you as in providing you with a place to live and love; it’s the nest that is given to you
On the other hand, being protected can also have a much more general meaning to it, one that applies to whole communities and countries rather than to one individual. For me, this is the idea of surveillance, of being watched and controlled every step we take, every word we say and every breathe we take. Recently, with technologies developing, there have been so many privacy scandals concerning our personal data, Snowden’s NSA scandal being only one of them. All our messages are monitored and read by someone else, our calls listened to and our interaction with others observed. It is almost like there is eyes everywhere, watching out every move, which is why I decided to make the trunk of the tree out of little eyes in different sizes and different colors. On a global scale, these eyes are what builds the foundation of our protection, as they spot and alarm as soon as something is off. As I understand this side of protection as more global and therefore more international, I decided to put English words that are understandable to the majority of people around the world.
Finally, the question that this raises is whether or not this sacrifice of privacy is worth the protection we get in return or not.
