Yesterday Things featured some thoughts on ruins. I’ve seen a few of Heiko Hebig’s photos of the Ruhr industrial landscape before, but not these two series, which are really lovely. Part of me thinks its impossible to take a bad photograph of an old, abandoned mill or factory. Something about the dual nature of disused industrial buildings: their massive size and utter emptiness, their functional construction and permanent stasis, those sorts of contrasts make them interesting subjects. When a smokestack falls down, there’s a rare and precious moment of action. (This one made me wonder who you have to know to be present at the demolition…)
I dug around mentally a bit and remembered Lostplaces.de, which collects images and information on disused buildings and disappearing towns around Germany. It has a definite emphasis on things military but it’s not reactionary nostalgia. The series on gas stations has a more pop culture feel to it and the documentations of former German-German border crossings [here, here, and here] captures the eerie and apparently permanent stillness of that no-man’s land.
This leaves me thinking about the ruins of Kassel in the 1950s: I’m working on the first documenta at the moment, and the Fridericianum, the show’s main building, was still in pretty bad shape in 1955. Looking at photographs of abandoned, demolished, or even bombed-out buildings can’t compare (I suspect) to being present in the ruins. This is what always strikes me in thinking about postwar Germany: living among rubble, the clearing away of the rubble, and then, once the rubble is totally gone and new construction takes its place, living with the memory of ruins, even when they’re not there. In the case of Kassel, it seems to me that, rather than gesturing towards a stable future, the flood of new architecture in the 1950s must have thrown the loss of the old city into high relief.
Posted by Heather at May 20, 2004 03:59 PM
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