The installation STORYBOARD (MONUMENTS MEN) was made for the Gorki Theater, Berlin, in 2015. In a perhaps reckless act of simplification that flirts with the building blocks of conspiracy theories, Zielony’s four glass display tables trace connections between Nazi looted art, Germany’s newly confident museum and restitution policies, George Clooney’s campaign against genocide and his appearance in a Nespresso advertising spot, and Napuli Langa’s occupation of a tree on Oranienplatz. Are these all connected? In a way they are. In 2013, the very rooms of Berlin’s Palais am Festungsgraben for which Zielony created his piece were among the locations where Clooney shot “The Monuments Men”, the heroic story of the American special unit that saved artistic treasures plundered by the Nazis. Some of them are now in the care of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (the Humboldtforum, currently under construction, is highly controversial).

Clooney’s work on humanitarian issues extends beyond the silver screen – it has taken him to outer space and back. Since 2010, his Satellite Sentinel Project has raised funds to help collect satellite-image evidence of crimes against international law. In the 2013 movie Gravity, Clooney then floated through space, dodging dangerous manmade debris. His dizzying metamorphoses – from movie hero to charity star, from Nestlé advertising icon to political agent – leave the facility manager of the Palais am Festungsgraben, whose observations are included in Zielony’s installation, unfazed. Magdi Lel-Gizouli, one of the authors in Zielony’s Citizen project, expands upon the complex set of issues, drawing connections between German migration law and the ways ethnographic collections are presented, between the refugee protests and the construction of a German arms factory in his native Sudan. Is this reality? Or fiction? It is a storyboard for a narrative about reality.