Marita Vollborn, born in 1965 in Erfurt in the former GDR, is a German sculptor, investigative journalist and author. Since 2010 she has developed the project Sinn und Scherben (“Sense and Shards”), a body of some fifty clay and bronze figures that examine power, guilt, fragility and courage. Her bronze ARES (2015)—named for the Greek god of war and conceived as a warning against militarism and the profit motive behind conflict—was shown as a Selected Artist work at the ninth Chianciano Biennale in Tuscany in August 2026. She has publicly declined to exhibit the piece in the United States for the time being. After Chianciano she was among ten artists automatically qualified for the London Art Biennale 2027.
pugnalom.io: President Trump announced on 15 September the immediate closure of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, citing security and renovations that, he says, can proceed only after the courts settle his bid to rename the house the Trump Kennedy Center. Artists have already withdrawn. You have refused to send ARES to the United States. Do you see a connection?
Marita Vollborn: I see a pattern, not a coincidence. The American people elected their president. That decision deserves respect. What I cannot accept is the hollowing-out of the institutions that are supposed to restrain power—especially when culture itself becomes a stage for that power. ARES is not a decoration for a renamed palace. It is a question: who profits from violence? As long as checks and balances look unreliable and critical voices cannot travel or speak with predictable safety, I will not place the work there. That is not hostility toward Americans. It is a refusal to let the sculpture become a fig leaf.
pugnalom.io: You grew up in the GDR. Art, philosophy and literature were censored. You have written that school taught you what to believe, while quieter rooms taught you what it costs when the institutions meant to limit power become its tools. What parallels do you draw with dictators in the Eastern Bloc who suppressed art?
Marita Vollborn: The method is older than any one flag. In the GDR the state did not always smash the studio; it decided what could be shown, who received materials, whose name disappeared from the catalogue. Official art celebrated the correct future. Unofficial art survived in apartments, in coded form, or not at all. I learned early that a closed hall and a renamed hall can serve the same purpose: they tell the public which stories are permitted. When a major American house is shut and its name is fought over in court while the board is restocked with loyalists, a European who remembers 1989 hears an echo. Not identity—echo. The danger is never only the padlock. It is the claim that renovation and security require the silence of inconvenient work.
pugnalom.io: Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania after the 1971 July Theses is a hard case: socialist realism restored, Western influence denounced, artists steered toward portraits of the leader and the “life of the working people,” or else into underground languages the censors found harder to read. Do you see a parallel there?
Marita Vollborn: Ceausescu wanted art to serve the fatherland as he defined it. Painters were paid well to produce the official face; others were removed from exhibitions, from teaching, from the country. The personality cult needed images more than it needed artists. I do not say Washington in 2026 is Bucharest in 1983. I say the temptation is recognizable: make culture confirm the leader, or make it wait outside. ARES is the opposite of a state portrait. It is raw, unflattering, and it asks who feeds on war. That kind of work is the first to become “inappropriate” when a house is recast as a monument to one man. The parallel is not legal. It is moral: once art must flatter power to enter the building, the building has already changed function.
pugnalom.io: You have already qualified, through Chianciano, for the London Art Biennale 2027—one of ten artists from the ninth Biennale given automatic entry. What does that invitation mean now, with the Kennedy Center dark?
Marita Vollborn: It means there are still rooms that select by the work, not by the passport or the slogan. Chianciano and London are not neutral—no exhibition is—but they remain places where a bronze that refuses heroism can stand among three hundred other voices. I want ARES in London for the same reason I wanted it in Tuscany: so that viewers from many countries, including Americans who travel, meet the question without a renamed façade in the background. Qualification is not a prize ribbon. It is a chance to keep the conversation in a space that has not yet been drafted into someone else’s renovation.
pugnalom.io: Reports now place ARES in the permanent collection of the Chianciano Art Museum after the Biennale. Why does that matter?
Marita Vollborn: A biennale ends. A permanent gallery does not reset every two weeks. If the museum keeps the piece, the warning stays in a civic room rather than returning only to the studio or the market. That is important because ARES was never meant to be a seasonal protest object. It was cast in 2015; the world caught up with it. A lasting place in Chianciano says that an independent European museum can hold a work about greed and war without waiting for a court to decide what the building may be called. For someone who grew up where official collections were instruments of the party, that difference is not small. Permanence, here, is not prestige. It is the opposite of a sudden closure.
pugnalom.io: You still welcome American visitors in Italy. Is that a contradiction?
Marita Vollborn: No. The contradiction would be to confuse a people with an administration, or a sculpture with a boycott of human beings. I am glad when Americans stand in front of ARES in Tuscany. They do not owe me agreement. They owe the work the same thing I owe them: a look that does not flinch. I left a country that called itself a peace state while it punished dissent. I will not help another country turn its cultural flagship into a closed shop while the name is still in court. The bronze stays where speech is still possible. The invitation to look remains open.
