Collection

The title of the work refers to the name of the “Source of Life” Care Association (Lebensborn eingetragener Verein)—an organization founded on Himmler’s orders in 1935 that formed a pillar of the Third Reich’s eugenics policy. As part of a multi‑year program of “breeding a Nordic race of superhumans,” selected German women and men from the ranks of the SS conceived at least 11,000 children. The installation consists of a cast of a Barbie doll enlarged to adult human scale, along with a film placed inside its abdomen in which we can observe the process of its production. The artist points out that the ideal of femininity embodied by a blue‑eyed blonde with 90 × 60 × 90 proportions, on the one hand, appears absurd when translated to a human scale, and on the other hand is not far removed from the Nazi fantasy of the Aryan superman. Although today the methods have become more subtle, women’s bodies continue to be objects of repression and conditioning.