Mother in South America
The cycle can be understood as Burkhard Driest’s tribute to his mother’s generation: women who had to raise and protect their children by themselves during the Second World War, who literally helped to rebuild as “rubble woman” but who were nevertheless repeatedly forced into the old role cliché “children, kitchen, church”. Driest represents these mothers as ageing women in a world of courageous departure and later, but even more pleasurable, self-discovery.
Aids
When Andy Warhol died of Aids in early 1987, Burkhard Driest lost a friend and a fellow artist whose work he admired. In the same year, Driest paints the suicide of someone suffering from Aids: Dieter. In the 1980s and 90s, the epidemic was widespread, especially among the homosexuals, and one or the other politician thought about deporting HIV-positive affected people to a deserted island.
Wackersdorf
To this day, Wackersdorf stands for a hard-fought but ultimately glorious victory of the anti-nuclear movement and the rural population against plans of the Bavarian state government: The central German reprocessing plant for spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants was to be built not far from the remote community Wackersdorf. From 1985 to 1989 there were repeated war-like confrontations between activists, the resident citizens of the district and thousands of police officers. In 1989, the state government capitulated and stopped the construction work.
Hafen street
Already beginning of the 1980s, left-wing activists in West German cities such as Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, and Hamburg protested against the destruction of city districts that have grown due to real estate speculation. The housing battle in Hamburg’s Hafenstraße became famous. Eight residential buildings from the period around 1900 were to be demolished and instead there were to be build office towers with 22 floors.
Homeless students occupied the buildings and barricaded themselves in. It became one of the most radical and protracted fights against the deconstruction of a housing area.
