The landscape I found has been under human transformation for a long time. Former wetlands were successively transformed into a highly engineered landscape and one of the most productive agricultural regions within Brandenburg. One day, King Friedrich II. proclaimed in front of a recently enlisted crowd of farmers from all over Europe: “I’ve gained new lands!” To reclaim the land, the swamp was drained of its water and its mystic.
Cross-border/international
Germany
Poland
{Empty}
Märkisch-Oderland, Brandenburg.
Mainly rural
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As an individual
First name: Simon-Jannis Last name: Kimmel Gender: Male Nationality: Germany Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Friedrichstr. 226 Town: Berlin Postal code: 10969 Country: Germany Direct Tel:+49 1512 7086918 E-mail:simon.j.kimmel@gmail.com
I was triggered by a passage in Degré Zéro by Ido Avissar talking about a new start:
It (...) involves the important task of choosing a place and a space. (…) this place of retreat equally aspires to be an abstract, non-specific space: an open field with an undifferentiated horizon.
I am interested in how a horizon is formed, both by the organic and non-organic. I would like to challenge and emphasize our perception of a landscape. This exhibition walks through different space and time layers in various scales interwoven into the present. As area under investigation I picked a strip of 10k by 5k meters in the Oderbruch, a former wetland rendered human 280 years ago under Prussian rule.
We now see it in its current state, but can we also sense what stages it went through, and intuit what it will become? How do we relate to traces that followed colonisation in forms of geo-engineering, agriculture and architecture? Some elements reemerging, others slowly or suddenly disappearing.
I am engaging with this cultivated, colonised land from above (analytically) and from the ground (personal, phenomenological)
Not as a solution but rather a proposal for the continuation of the active survey my interventions aim to ask rather than proclaim. They offer another stance, shift one’s horizon within these plains. I understand it as a reconciliation between deep time and space layers within an area I call sideshow, as it sits just outside Berlin, just at the border to Poland, just on the river banks of the Oder. On the way I cross the non-specific space, open fields and a seemingly undifferentiated horizon. This horizon is a dynamic line separating the ground from the sky. Or is it where both collide? Of what constitutes this landscape, how did the horizon emerge that I found and how is it sustained? How will it change? What spatial elements are present, and what role can architecture play within a Kulturlandschaft?
Rendered Human
Transformation
Wetland
Traces
Hauntology
Before we can discuss sustainability issues we have to redefine the term "Kulturlandschaft" and see, what belongs to it, from deep time layers such as the dried out rivers towards a dying rural reality recolonised by romantic ideals of a sacred home in the countryside.
"It’s about reducing it to a tantalising tissue of traces, a virtual object all the more beguiling because of its partial desubstantialisation." BEVAN, William Emmanuel (Burial) , in Fisher, 97
Driving through the landscape, walking through its fields I only scratched the flat surface. Yet combining it with the analysis of maps and timelines, I discovered it's non-linear connection. From categorising its elements I stepped down towards touching the traces, from every moment that had passed in these lands until now and that direct into the future.
Traces of different origins and intentions. Traces left knowingly as a mark extend communication beyond the verbal. In that sense, architecture can be such a trace.
Traces can be found where we drop something for we cannot bear their weight any longer. Or for considering them obsolete. Careless they seem to the human eye. Trash on the sideway, or a left-behind suitcase of a migrant.
Then, there are lingering objects forming traces as the agent had the intention of returning but never did. Like the keys on a nail and the shoes on the floor of a burnt down farm. Like clay and sediments in a parched riverbed, not carried further as the water stopped out.
Inclusion beyond our species is key to understand our deep entanglement in the world.
Location and momentum: A mark on the village outskirts, a brick tower deprived of its roof and purpose. How can one grasp it in its Euclidean entirety? Heisenberg discovered that one cannot precisely determine both place and momentum as the observation itself affects the outcome.
That thin line between earth and sky – the horizon – shifts with elevation. From a cube one can only see as much as three sides simultaneously. So, every turn to reveal a side hidden from perception, obscures a familiar one.
The stairs climb and wind and thus form a tool for observation. Inwardly towards – and at a certain point even penetrating – the tower as well as outwardly pushing the horizon away with every step taken. Every analysis affects the analysed. Look but don’t touch, yet endlessly engaging.
Drainage makes the land arable, accessible. The water is channelled into controllable paths and withdrawn from the land through canals and drainages, pumping stations and dikes. The "New Province", the resulting landscape is prepared for a new form of inscription. Still, after almost 300 years of draining, the meandering arms of the Old Oder are clearly visible, exactly where the new inscription takes place year after year: In the crops, which grow worse and remain lower in these places. Ignoring parcel boundaries, they break with the grid, the archetypal symbol of colonisation. The more intensively the land is cultivated, the more clearly the meandering veins show.
"It was quite natural that in this wide valley, where nothing restricted its course, the Oder River divided into several branches and left its deep bed during heavy outpourings, covering it with a layer of rich clay in the following floods, which created the multitude of veins that are now called Schrindstellen, which are distinguished from the rest of the Bruchlande by their barrenness" (Ulrich, 42, Province).
Once upon a time, the Oder meandered through the Bruch in ever-changing courses. The flat land did not provide a firm hold for its bed. Sediments carried along with it were deposited in meandering lines. Invisible to the human eye, they penetrate everything that is newly inscribed in this soil: Seeds thrive there less splendidly and so the old veins and show in the fields.
This started as a personal voyage and is seen as only the starting point, a trial before reconnecting with the other. Potential non-traditional stakeholders (such as the dried-out river arms, the keychain left in the burnt down house, the crop that grows in various heights with no visible difference) were found and touched. Within the societal structures, allies can be found yet the focus lies in the extension of existing networks, a surplus for a landscape that is not only cultivated but culturally rich from within.
Drainage makes the land arable, accessible. The water is channelled into controllable paths and withdrawn from the land through canals and drainages, pumping stations and dikes. The "New Province", the resulting landscape is prepared for a new form of inscription. Still, after almost 300 years of draining, the meandering arms of the Old Oder are clearly visible, exactly where the new inscription takes place year after year: In the crops, which grow worse and remain lower in these places. Ignoring parcel boundaries, they break with the grid, the archetypal symbol of colonisation. The more intensively the land is cultivated, the more clearly the meandering veins show.
"It was quite natural that in this wide valley, where nothing restricted its course, the Oder River divided into several branches and left its deep bed during heavy outpourings, covering it with a layer of rich clay in the following floods, which created the multitude of veins that are now called Schrindstellen, which are distinguished from the rest of the Bruchlande by their barrenness" (Ulrich, 42, Province).
Once upon a time, the Oder meandered through the Bruch in ever-changing courses. The flat land did not provide a firm hold for its bed. Sediments carried along with it were deposited in meandering lines. Invisible to the human eye, they penetrate everything that is newly inscribed in this soil: Seeds thrive there less splendidly and so the old veins and show in the fields.
The arms of the river that run through the quarry hardly carry any water any more. The memories of the wetland, on the other hand, inscribe them anew each year in the field crop.
Computers and drone-assisted analyses will soon make these unproductive ditches obsolete for cultivation. Sowing 68 centimetres further will pay for itself many times over. These methods are already in use on large farms around the world.
It is only a matter of time before they are used here. The footbridges reach out and take us to the places that clearly show it: Amidst the fields, between sunflowers and maize vines, the footbridge raised to a bridge gives us a view of the runs that criss-cross the land. Once meandering, always looking for a new bed, today stoic and ever-recurring. Sedimentary deposits from a past flow.
Meandering
Surveying
Surveying does not submit to any purpose, but provides the basis for an ongoing discussion about how we treat our environment and the cultural, ecological and econom
Meandering. The arms of the river that run through the quarry hardly carry any water any more. The memories of the wetland, on the other hand, inscribe them anew each year in the field crop.
Computers and drone-assisted analyses will soon make these unproductive ditches obsolete for cultivation. Sowing 68 centimetres further will pay for itself many times over. These methods are already in use on large farms around the world.
It is only a matter of time before they are used here. The footbridges reach out and take us to the places that clearly show it: Amidst the fields, between sunflowers and maize vines, the footbridge raised to a bridge gives us a view of the runs that criss-cross the land. Once meandering, always looking for a new bed, today stoic and ever-recurring. Sedimentary deposits from a past flow.
Surveying.
As temporary survey structures, the footbridges follow new paths through the farmland every year. This creates a geodesy of memory. The surveys carried out after drainage and to establish the colonisation grid are juxtaposed with a new survey.
This triangulation not only surveys the land in its Euclidean extent, but also the elements of the rupture. The heights of the ridge provide information about the spread and presence of the former river veins. Thus they become perceptible from a distance. The footbridges span and connect at the same time. Not so much beginning and end, but the in-between becomes relevant. Entering is possible at crossings with existing paths.
The elevations draw the landscape. Each elevation in the flat land serves as orientation, draws attention to its origin. In contrast to the dikes, which also rise from the flat land,footbridges are, however, maximally permeable.
Reconciling. Surveying does not submit to any purpose, but provides the basis for an ongoing discussion about how we treat our environment and the cultural, ecological and economic significance of this landscape. At best, the footbridges have the capacity to reconcile traces from a repressed time with the more recent history of this landscape.
Speculate. One infrastructure examines another. Footbridges project straight into the cultivated land, opening up new perspectives on the productive spaces in between.
The scrubland, former river courses - often the only usable ways to get around in the impenetrable swamp - have no place as productive farmland in the highly mechanised agricultural economy.
Can they once again serve as a network of paths, creating new access to the fertile soils and their cultivation? It would not be the first time that the use, vegetation and appearance of this landscape changed radically.
Radiating
The grid The parcelling that accompanied colonisation radiated out from the colonist villages, which were laid out like rulers or snakes next to the old villages. Behind the houses were gardens for self-sufficiency. In their extension, the fields were laid out as long strips to create as few turning points as possible for the cattle-drawn wagons.
Bumping.
The consistency with which the parcelling radiates meets Prussian pragmatism. The parcels of land bump into each other along still existing streams and canals and ultimately against themselves. A patchwork quilt emerges from the bumping and reflecting, the subjugation of the element of water, striped rectangles and triangles that meet at the most diverse angles and ultimately settle the access to the fertile land among themselves. If only control were total - for even today the real estate cadastre reads in this close-meshed network - the Oderbruch would blossom in striped diversity.
However, the extensive farmland paints a different picture. The once finely meshed grid of Prussian colonisation was further extended by the consolidation of parcels for the purpose of cultivation using heavy machinery. And even this large-meshed grid is reaching its limits. Along with waterways, it collides with the villages, which lie scattered like islands in a sea of sunflowers, rape and maize. On the edge of the settlements lie large-scale agricultural and industrial facilities such as container ships, alongside an increasing number of black photovoltaic fields and wind farms.
Set back.
The resolution has been reduced further and further, thus increasing the size of the plots. Now the smallness of the colonial grid, which has become obsolete in the field economy, has been thrown back onto the street and angrarian villages. Only here does this logic still exist, which has otherwise been bypassed by large machines.
The exhibition consists of fragmented elements, traces of the Oderbruch, a former swamp on the Eastern border of Brandenburg. Maps of different media, inclosed dusts and plants, cardboard models, photographs form a non-linear walk through the land, a personal storyline derived from site visits, GIS maps and stories.
As temporary survey structures, the footbridges follow new paths through the farmland every year. This creates a geodesy of memory. The surveys carried out after drainage and to establish the colonisation grid are juxtaposed with a new survey.
This triangulation not only surveys the land in its Euclidean extent, but also the elements of the rupture. The heights of the ridge provide information about the spread and presence of the former river veins. Thus they become perceptible from a distance. The footbridges span and connect at the same time. Not so much beginning and end, but the in-between becomes relevant. Entrances and exits are possible at crossings with existing paths.
The elevations draw the landscape. Each elevation in the flat land serves as orientation, draws attention to its origin. In contrast to the dikes, which also rise from the flat land, the footbridges are, however, maximally permeable. They even yearn for the water that washes around their pillars.
