The first thing you see is a cone. White, plastered over, it seems to float in the narrow stairwell. Only when you take a closer look do you see that the cone is hanging on a wire rope, many meters long. From above it looks like an object in free fall. The square staircase looks like the frame around this floating piece of white. But: No cone, no snowball is floating there. But a wrecking ball.
That’s what Susanne Ramolla’s work title says. The Potsdam native is one of 40 artists who are currently playfully conquering a concrete giant just outside the Potsdam city limits – after decades of radio silence. For nine days, industrial wasteland becomes exhibition space. The content bracket reads more up-to-date than ever: Save. As a result of the war in Ukraine, grain is scarce, and the question of heat storage is omnipresent in view of the energy crisis. And how can experiences, memories, past times be preserved? This show asks that too.
[Wenn Sie aktuelle Nachrichten aus Berlin, Deutschland und der Welt live auf Ihr Handy haben wollen, empfehlen wir Ihnen unsere App, die Sie hier für Apple- und Android-Geräte herunterladen können.]
A group of art lovers from the Artifact association came up with the idea. In Potsdam, everyone knows the granary – without really knowing it. Since 1992, no one has been able to get in legally. A place for graffiti sprayers and illegal band rehearsals. The Artifact artist Jenny Alten knew him since 2006, forgot him again. In 2021 he came back to her. Nine floors of a well-ventilated industrial ruin: In times of lockdown, this seemed an ideal place to make something like togetherness possible again.
When art can now be seen on five floors and 1800 square meters, the artists are not only concerned with the public, which is cordially invited, but just as much with each other. About the exchange, about strengthening networks that have become fragile due to the pandemic – or weaving new ones. This is represented by works by artists from Ukraine who are now working in Potsdam: Artem Voloktin, Tetiana Malinovska, Anna Moskalets and Valeriia Buchuk.
[ Bis 11.9. Getreidespeicher, Ladestraße 1, Bergholz-Rehbrücke, tgl. 12 bis 19 Uhr. Reservierung auf www.eventbrite.com nötig.]
Susanne Ramolla’s wrecking ball was created in 2021. The artist herself sees her work as a “symbol of the wasteland left behind by a Covid-19 planet”. But here, in the more than 30 meter high tower of a granary belonging to the VEB “Kombinat Progress Landmaschinen”, this gigantic concrete structure from the 1960s, unused for three decades, the wrecking ball also evokes the fragility of political systems that seemed carved in concrete.
The monumental granary is protected from actual demolition: it is an industrial monument. When it was built in 1963, it was a prototype, “an export hit,” says Jenny Alten, who has researched the history of the place. The monumental height of the building was definitely a political statement: the GDR showed confidence in its own economic strength. And of course that was inseparable from the ideology of the “workers’ and peasants’ state”.
In the past, three kilotons of grain could be processed in the granary, which was blown up through huge pipes and dried. There must have been an unbelievable noise. When the people from Artifact came, only the cooing of pigeons disturbed the silence. “This contrast interested me,” says the Potsdam artist Udo Koloska. In the architecture of the silo he sees the “material manifestation of human ideas, social utopias.” His work, he says, is “a form of sensual archaeology”.
Good mood despite ideological ballast
Koloska has attached a Morse code machine to a huge, rusty grain drying machine using magnets and cables. Sounds can be heard, sometimes hesitant, sometimes pulsating, amplified by the dryer’s resonance chamber. “It is the Communist Manifesto translated into Morse code” by Karl Marx. A work that listens deeply to the ideological ballast that weighs on this building – and that nevertheless puts you in a good mood. It shows: It’s music in old tin.
Markus Große also looks back playfully. Since 2019 he has been collecting editions of the printed work that was probably the most widespread in the GDR: “Universe Earth Man”, from 1954 to 1974 mainly given to the youth initiation. Great bought more than 90 on Ebay. They are packed, neatly stacked, on the floor. “A work about the aesthetics of collecting and the desire to line things up,” writes Große. “About the principle of art and the question of which physical and spiritual dimensions constitute reality, the truth of something.” He too is an archaeologist. Like Felix Becker. He deals with leftovers of a different kind. In the middle is a sculpture made of wooden parts: former fruit crates. One senses legs, a body, maybe a shell. Beetle, amoeba, robot? A creature in search of food? Becker’s monochrome pictures stand in seemingly stark contrast to the sculpture. Two areas of oil paint, black and white. The texture plays the main role here as well. A squirrel is carved into the black surface. The white surface shows marks and scratches, like wounds. It is reminiscent of old walls from which the paint has chipped. Shows that under each layer there is another.
“Menstruation Manual”
Many works were created especially for this place. The Syrian artist Sana Al-Kurdi has installed a video work on indoctrination in Syria in one corner. Together with the Chaos Computer Club, Jenny Alten has developed a pumping system that is based on the old storage tubes: a gigantic tube system that pumps a phosphorescent liquid through the entire building. She calls it the “Menstruation Manual”. And up on the fifth floor, Cécile Wesolowski lets the human memory flutter in the wind: Wind chimes dangle from the ceiling, blood-red shapes reminiscent of brains. Silver strips of paper hang underneath. When they flutter, it sounds like the flapping of the wings of the doves that have had the attic to themselves for so long.
