Morphine

If you ask the population about famous people from Paderborn, Heinz Nixdorf, Rüdiger Hofmann or Judith Rakers are often mentioned. The name Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner, on the other hand, comes up relatively rarely. Yet his research played a decisive role in medicine in the 19th century. The pharmacist was born in Neuhaus in 1783. In his experiments, he succeeded in extracting the substance morphine from the drug opium. The duo Joko and Uthmann take up this discovery in their six-storey mural in Schloss Neuhaus. The substance morphine is extracted from the poppy plant, which is depicted here in the portrait as a woman's headdress. When developing the motifs, Joko and Uthmann collaborated with the Bielefeld-based collage and mixed media artist Inside-a-ginger, a collaboration that was successfully realised on a large building wall at the first Secret City façade festival on Rathenaustraße in 2021. A special feature this year was that the artificial intelligence Midjourney was used to inspire the design of the portrait. This step does not simply mean creating art at the touch of a button. The template was repeatedly revised using so-called prompts and adapted to Joko & Uthmann's ideas. This process took several hours of creative work on the computer. On the left-hand side of the house wall is an impressive depiction of the moated castle in SchlossNeuhaus, whose design and perspective hark back to the tradition of Renaissance landscape painting. In future, this impressive wall monument could help to ensure that the name Sertürner is mentioned more often when it comes to celebrities from Paderborn.