In dense urban space, controversially held debates arise repeatedly about who may utilize the city and how. Here, the population’s widespread acceptance of a politics of separation and exclusion is noticeable. On the local level this becomes clear, for example, in connection with zones where alcohol and begging are banned, in the housing of refugees, or the construction of minarets. But displacement also takes place when people are obliged to move away from the city centre to the periphery as a result of rising rents.

Such social processes concern us all due to the cultural, historical and above all economic interlinks between many places in the world, but also between different social classes.

Power and responsibility cannot be separated. Mutually playing off the general population and groups forced to the edges of society, as sometimes occurs in public discussion, is contradictory – as responsibility is being shifted in this context. Rather, the assumption of power through the cumulation of income and property, partially triggered by democratic political mechanisms, brings along responsibility as well.

Exclusionary policy constructs structural and infrastructural hurdles for those people and groups affected and adds to the inequality of opportunities. Separation, therefore, contributes to the stabilizing of a hierarchy whereby rich nations secure their prosperity under conditions that exploit the poorer countries.

The art installation Please sit down! by Thomas Medicus establishes a connection between specific local phenomena and the world’s global networks. Hereby, it highlights the massively unequal distribution of power and resources as our primary social challenge. The intervention enables the perception of invisible borders, draws attention to problematic contexts, and is thus intended to encourage people to adopt an evaluating, responsible and critical standpoint in discussion. It reveals a dystopia in which the park bench, as a seat and a symbol of participation in urban space, exists only as an inaccessible museum piece exhibited in a glass showcase.