Podcast - All Rhine! |February 12, 2021

Mike Litt in conversation with Jacques Tilly

How's it going, Düsseldorf?

Our podcast "All Rhine" for culture in times of Corona. What Mike Litt wants to know: How did the talk guests perceive the surreal times? What has changed for you? What projects are they working on now?
In Episode 21, Mike talks with Jacques Tilly, artist and large-scale sculpture builder.

Jacques Tilly is the intellectual head of the Düsseldorf Carnival. Once a year, politicians and church representatives tremble at his ideas. He builds the famous floats for the Shrove Monday procession, which are shown on the evening news and sometimes even end up in the "New York Times". The most beautiful large-scale figures are stored in his carriage construction hall in Düsseldorf-Bilk: Trump, Putin - and Greta Thunberg. He also recreated the Corona virus back in February 2020 - when the train was still rolling. A year later, Covid-19 is preventing the staging of his carnival satire show.

They used to build the floats in the old fair, and it was frosty in every respect. An invisible demarcation line ran between carnivalists and artists. The jesters maltreated the artists with mood music, the painters set up yogurt cups as traps and rejoiced when the paint splashed up their uniforms. There were artists like Gerhard Richter, Anatol Herzfeld and, rumor has it, Günther Uecker, to earn a few marks on the side. Only their gallery owners were not allowed to know about it. The proximity to the art academy ensured that the artistic level of the Düsseldorf train was always quite high.

Tilly's floats with wonderfully provocative large-scale sculptures have been part of the Düsseldorf carnival for decades and are now world-famous. The intrepid artist now even travels abroad with the theme floats, even if they are not used to celebrate carnival but to demonstrate. In this exciting episode about carnival week, when everything is a little different than usual, Tilly tells us how he and his team of strong women usually work under high pressure, why the last few months were not really relaxing and why he prefers to leave the "erection of monuments for eternity" to other artists.

Our host

Mike Litt was born in the US state of Virginia and lived in Bochum for many years. The globetrotter usually works in Cologne but lives with his family in the beautiful Düsseltal district of Düsseldorf. He is a radio presenter (1Live, WDR 2, DLF Nova), a DJ with Mayday festival experience and an author (‘The loneliest DJ in the world’). For our podcast, he holds fascinating conversations with other people from Düsseldorf’s cultural scene.