Bonus (Zugabe)

Dieter Mersch writes in his essay Die Zugabe (encore) von Florian Dombois: “An encore is a supplement, an extra piece requested by the audience, an added value that goes beyond the main piece and is added to it. We applaud; and what we want is an addition, a popular extra that pleases. Sometimes, however, something is presented as a “gift” that acts as a Trojan horse, a Greek gift that undermines the original delivery and gives it a different meaning. The supplement then has an effect that has an inherent reflective potential that allows the given to be seen anew, even to be ridiculed. This is the nature of Florian Dombois' “Zugabe”: a cunning excess in the middle of the newly built Potsdam City Palace, which uncovers the backdrop architecture of modern “tourist historicism” by adding further, smaller-scale scenes in the double sense of the word, not to multiply the supposed splendor of history, but to diminish it. The addition thus not only complements, it literally adds to the added, devaluing it. And since a single addition is usually not enough, but the addition must be flanked by further additions in order to break their reflexivity again, Florian Dombois has attached a proportionally staggered further supplement to his supplement, which, like a rhizomatic fungus, further potentiates the backdrop of the backdrop.
The Potsdamers beat the Berliners to the city palace reconstruction. While the latter were still discussing, Potsdam created facts out of concrete: a functional building, equipped with a mystifying façade that looks like a palace but is not one, but is instead intended to house the state parliament in the future: democratic debates in a feudal ambience, in which the pre-democratic floor plan is being restored. It is the former Winter Palace, whose twin, the summer residence Sanssouci Palace, now appears as a revenant in the middle of the newly created courtyard in the form of a photographically scanned dome painted onto an aluminum structure, sprouting mushroom-like out of the ground to wreak subversive havoc there, like a comedic detail [...].” (translated from German)

Description in Müller, Josef Felix (ed.): Florian Dombois: Zugabe, St. Gallen / Berlin, Vexer 2014