» When did and why, the first inflatable sex doll come about? Janez Jansa, an artist from Slovenia, starts his interactive project with these questions. As a starting point, the artist takes up the story about the first inflatable sex-doll, published by the press in Europe in 2005. According to that story, in 1941 the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler commissioned the Danish doctor Olen Hannusen to come up with the first inflatable sex-doll. The doll had to satisfy the sexual needs of the German army, whose soldiers visited brothels, in which they caught all sorts of diseases or, even worse, had sex with non- Aryan women and therefore contaminated the German race. Commander of the SS Heinrich Himmler was in charge of the project. The plan never came to life because the factory in Dresden that was to produce the doll was bombed by the Allies.
By researching into and analyzing the story published in the press, the artist expands his concerns to the interesting problematics of a totalitarian regime that started the industrialisation of sex and the control of sexual relations, and therefore all sorts of social and cultural aspects of sexuality.
The interactive installation SS-XXX / Die Frau Helga, is a part of a wider intermedia project by Janez Jansa titled RE:act! (www.reakt.org) in which, through analysis, deconstruction and reconstruction of chosen historical events, the artist explores the role of the media in the manipulation of perception, creating both (post)modern historical myths and contemporary mythologies, as well as contemporary ideological and intellectual canons and structures of power. The RE:act! project consists of many parts, some of which have been presented in Berlin, Paris, Prague and Ljubljana.
