A seven-metre-high white inflatable floats on a platform in the moat beside Ghent’s Gravensteen, the city’s medieval Count’s Castle. It stands up only as long as a pumping station keeps working, and visitors are invited to do the pumping. The sign reads “Train your perseverance!” Stop, and the figure sinks into an empty shell.
The work is Perseverance (Goddess of Democracy) by the Austrian artist duo zweintopf. It reinterprets the Goddess of Democracy, the ten-metre statue built by Chinese art students on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in May 1989, days before the military suppression of the pro-democracy protests destroyed it.
Where the idea lands
The mechanism is doing the argument, and it is doing it without a wall text.
A public monument’s entire rhetorical function is permanence. Stone, bronze, plinth, scale — the material claims that the thing it commemorates is settled and will outlast you. That is what makes the form useful to states, and it is why toppling one is such a legible act.
zweintopf’s version keeps the scale and the authority of the public statue and swaps the material for textile and plastic over wood and metal, connected to a pump. The claim of permanence is withdrawn, and what replaces it is a condition: this exists while effort is being applied to it. Walk away and it is gone within minutes.
Set against the masonry, crenellations and defensive architecture of Gravensteen, the contrast is not subtle and does not need to be. One structure was built to be impossible to remove. The other requires someone to show up.
Why the physical labour is not decoration
The participatory element could easily have been a button. It is a pump, and that difference carries the piece.
Pressing a button to keep something alive is a symbolic gesture — you understand the metaphor and you have spent nothing. Working a pump is work. Your arms get tired, the volume you are inflating is large relative to what one person can move, and the thing visibly responds to your effort and visibly stops responding when you stop. The metaphor stops being a metaphor and becomes a fact about your afternoon.
That is the gap most participatory work falls into: the interaction is available, legible, and costless, so the audience performs it once for the understanding and then leaves. Here the cost is the content. You find out how long you are willing to hold up a symbol, which is a less comfortable question than the one the wall text would have asked.
Dates and context
The sculpture has travelled since its first presentation in 2019 — UNIKUM’s Europapark in Klagenfurt, steirischer herbst’s Sculptures in Exile, the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, and Kunstverein Graz among others. For Ghent, the recently reopened Design Museum Gent commissioned a replica.
- Beside Gravensteen — through 14 October 2026
- Inner courtyard, Design Museum Gent — from 15 October 2026
It is part of Public Matter(s): Democracy Workout, a Design Museum Gent programme built around practising skills — listening, finding your voice, negotiating compromise, handling conflict constructively — on the premise that democracy is something people do rather than something they have. The sculpture is the programme’s thesis in physical form, which is a rare case of a public work and its framing actually agreeing.