The Wall Still Standing

There’s something almost too neat about the image: a Femen activist, topless, swinging a sledgehammer at a surviving section of the Berlin Wall. The symbolism writes itself, which is usually a sign that it won’t be taken seriously by the people it’s aimed at—but the image lands anyway, because the Wall is one of those objects that doesn’t stop meaning things.

The protest was timed to a Brussels summit meant to clarify the relationship between the EU and Ukraine. Femen’s statement was blunt: the obstacles placed in front of Ukraine’s path to EU membership are themselves a kind of wall—bureaucratic, political, and increasingly backed by force, given what Russia was doing in the Donbas and had already done in Crimea since 2014. The unnamed activist’s message was directed at the delegates: the Maidan protests of 2013 were a country’s population stating a preference, loudly, at considerable personal cost. Three years on, Ukraine still wasn’t in the EU.

Femen’s tactics tend to generate more discussion about the tactics than about the cause, which is a recurring problem with spectacle-based activism. Topless women with slogans painted across their torsos photograph well; the question of whether the EU will ever seriously commit to Ukrainian membership is harder to render visually. But I find something genuinely stubborn about the image—a single person hitting a wall that was already broken, in a city that knows what walls cost, for a country that’s been waiting a long time.