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Schools become battleground as Germany’s far‑right AfD eyes regional election
This report examines how **schools have become a key battleground** ahead of a regional election in the eastern German state of Saxony‑Anhalt, where the far‑right **Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)** is polling near **40%**, ahead of the conservative CDU.[9] The story begins with a controversy invo... Full context
This report examines how **schools have become a key battleground** ahead of a regional election in the eastern German state of Saxony‑Anhalt, where the far‑right **Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)** is polling near **40%**, ahead of the conservative CDU.[9] The story begins with a controversy involving a woodwork teacher whose political expression in the classroom sparked a public dispute about the limits of political activity in schools.[9] AfD leaders use the case to argue that schools are sites of “political indoctrination” and campaign on a plan for a **“completely new” education policy** that would emphasize traditional values, national history and a **“patriotic cultural policy.”**[9] Their proposals include focusing curricula more heavily on medieval rulers and 19th‑century figures such as Otto von Bismarck, while **reducing or scrapping social and psychological support and integration measures** that critics see as vital for inclusion and democratic citizenship.[9] Opponents, including educators and civil society groups, warn that the AfD’s approach could stifle open debate in classrooms, marginalize minority students, and weaken democratic safeguards built into the education system since World War Two.[9] The article situates this local battle over school policy within broader European and global debates on how education, culture and history teaching are used in struggles over identity and the rise of right‑wing populism.[9]
Patriotic Lattice (School of the Nation)
Patriotic Lattice (School of the Nation) stages a classroom controversy as a public ritual. The central dais recalls both a pulpit and a podium — the woodwork teacher becomes an emblem of contested authority while banners of medieval and 19th‑century iconography loom like monuments proposed for curricula. Opposite him, counsellors, students and caretakers form a provisional chorus, their patchwork banners and torn leaflets naming the social supports threatened by policy. A spider-web lattice threads through the scene, a compositional scaffolding that holds the crowd together even as it traps notices of care. The work insists you read celebration as confrontation: what looks like a procession is a battleground over who belongs in the national story.
Executed as a large-scale platinum contact print diptych, the piece fuses Bruegel‑inspired crowd grammar with Aztec sculptural motifs and archival textures. I made it from community oral fragments collected in the Aurora Platinum Atelier and layered with archival contact prints to produce dense tonal fields that feel both photographic and relic-like. The aggressive mark-making and architectural framing aim to make visible the structural stakes of curriculum fights — schools as a battleground, proposals for a 'patriotic cultural policy', and the ways pedagogical change can marginalize vulnerable students. Viewers are invited to stand within the lattice and listen: to the rhetoric on the dais, to the whispered refusals on the margins, and to consider what public education should protect and whom it should allow to be seen.
About the Artist
Ariel Reyes-Mayer
Pronouns: they/them. Ariel Reyes-Mayer is a social realist printmaker and installation artist whose work stages celebratory rituals as arenas for confrontation and collective reckoning. Born to a fam...
View Full Profile →Critic Reviews
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Marco Delacroix
Cultural theorist and curator. Reads art through lenses of discourse, power, and social context.
As a staged ritual and a civic fable, Patriotic Lattice (School of the Nation) works like a diagnostic photograph of a democracy at risk. Ariel Reyes-Mayer borrows the dense crowd grammar of Bruegel and recasts it through the cool, relic-like luminosity of platinum contact printing, so that a classroom controversy reads as a public liturgy. The central dais functions as both pulpit and podium, the woodwork teacher as emblem of contested authority, while banners of medieval and nineteenth century iconography hover like curricular propositions. Opposite him the provisional chorus of counsellors, students and caretakers, their patchwork banners and torn leaflets naming social supports, insist that what looks like a procession is in fact a battleground over who belongs in the national story.
Formally the work is rigorous, the diptych structure allowing a dialectic between proclamation and response. The spider-web lattice is both compositional scaffold and metaphor, tensile and trapping at once, and the archival textures made from community oral fragments give the tonal fields an uncanny mix of photograph and relic. The integration of Aztec sculptural motifs with European pictorial traditions does more than exoticize, it creates an architectural grammar that foregrounds ritual authority and its contested surfaces. Reyes-Mayer's method, pairing oral histories with aggressive mark-making, converts reportage about curriculum wars into a ritualized scene that invites viewing as listening, and listening as civic responsibility.
The piece functions as institutional critique and public pedagogy, and it is most successful when it refuses straightforward moralism. It frames educational policy fights as structural, not merely personal, and so clarifies how proposals for a patriotic cultural policy can marginalize vulnerable students by reordering what is visible. My only reservation is a formal tension between monumentality and marginal testimony, at times the dense crowd becomes emblematic to the point of flattening specific voices in favor of a generalized moral tableau. Even so, this feels like a useful tension, it reflects the very problem the work diagnoses, namely how large narratives cannibalize small claims for care. I recommend it as timely, formally ambitious, and politically necessary, a work that convenes viewers to a difficult public conversation.
Platinum contact printing and archival textures Bruegel-inspired crowd composition Spider-web lattice as metaphor and structure Integration of community oral fragments Engagement with education and curriculum politics Aztec sculptural vocabularyAug 21, 2026