The southern part of Nuremberg has an ambivalent reputation. A colorful, a shimmering, a really metropolitan district, say some. Visually it takes getting used to, sometimes precarious, untidy, say others. In Berlin one would say: rough. Nelson-Mandela-Platz is only part of Nuremberg’s Südstadt insofar as it is located south of the Altstadtring – and everything south of there is, by definition, counted as Südstadt. Actually, the square is the southern Bahnhofspiazza. So far, it has not been one of the places to which architectural lyricists praised “quality of stay”, but now – after a long remodeling phase – it is making a name for itself with art in public spaces. With a rough diamond floating in a transparent acrylic glass stele, so to speak.
Oh, oh, that’s the stuff of the boulevard, of course. Anyone who wants to take a look at the work on Friday morning ends up in a live broadcast: do you like, do you, are you allowed to do that? The barely covered subtext is about whether a rough diamond will be granted a long stay in this place. At the train station! In the south of the city! A value in the five-digit amount has made the rounds, the value of the gemstone is probably more in the mid-four-digit range, but, of course, diamond is diamond.
The work is the result of an art competition with the aim of doing justice to the namesake of the square – Nelson Mandela. The winner was a work by the two artists Andrea Knobloch and Ute Vorkoeper, who call themselves “missing icons” as a duo. They called their work “Rolihlahla” (roughly: Troublemaker or troublemaker) – like Nelson Mandela’s second name. The city puts the total cost of art and competition at 143,000 euros, and the work was funded by the federal and state governments.
Like a gemstone that is barely visible from a distance, sparkles in the light from close up, the sculpture should be understood as a “productive troublemaker”. The goal is likely to have already been achieved. The boulevard categorizes the work as a “stolen work of art”. Which presumably does not want to be understood as a request.