Station 2: Desk

In modern times in Europe the desk became a powerful tool in the colonization of both the Americas, Africa, Australia and significant regions of Asia. It wasn’t until the “vast realm of the oceans” was represented and organized in the “small realm of the office” – as the media historian Bernhard Siegert writes – that global companies could operate in the manner and scale that we know today. A direct line leads from the desk of a modern ruler to the computer monitors of contemporary corporate and government headquarters. Nina Simone sings an unintentionally ironic hymn to the bureaucratization of the world through a telephone earpiece: an icon of modern administration (Apparat ‘telephone handset’ 1936). The desk lamp model Helion used by the East German Ministry of State Security illuminates the ensemble. A Rolodex that can be thumbed through like a flip book presents emblems of modern global appropriation which are only seemingly harmless – globe and atlas, map and star.