weekend girl | messy retrospectacles

Le Parc de La Villette – a landscape for the 21st century

Posted on September 17, 2016 by Christine

Is Future Aging?

What happens to future when a brand-new generation of toddlers has arrived to look at it? When the avantgarde of two generations ago is walking grandchildren through the landscapes of old-but-bold dreams as, for example, at Le parc de la Villette in Paris’ 19th arrondissement?

Géode(1)

The small ones will wonder at the spectacular, shiny mirror which their avantgarde grandparents point out to them and they’ll take the kaleidoscopic reflections of La Géode for the real thing: the multi-faceted urban reality of Le Parc de La Villette. AdobePhotoshopExpress_03ae20efdde649b89414371fb0302da3

La Géode touches the eye with 6.433 triangles of preformed polished stainless steel on its perfectly smooth, shimmering surface and it reflects the surrounding world like a fortune teller’s magic sphere. Designed and constructed by the brothers Fainsilber, it opened as a 360° cinema-house in 1984, with a hemispherical screen of enormous 1000 m² and 26 m in diameter. Some steps further and La Géode mysteriously vanishes into the northeast Parisian sky – only to jump at the scene again behind the next bend of the path, like an apparition.

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The Parc de La Villette surpasses the traditional idea of nature to be embedded into the cityscape. Rather, the architect (Tschumi, 1984) envisioned the site of former meat-markets and second-empire slaughter-houses as an urban landscape where natural and artificial elements are brought alive together. Still, of the 55 hectare some 34 are dedicated to large, green surfaces which inspire Parisians to gather and interact or just to relax and meditate.The park hosts all kinds of events and activities such as game playing, exercising, entertainment, markets and has the Museum of Technology and Science and the City of Music on site, additionally.

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Museum of Technology and Science

In a way, the Parc de La Villette is a puzzling space and often it resembles a very big, ‘jumpy’ and discontinuous building which meanders unpredictably around numerous open-air spaces which were categorized as ‘surfaces’ by the architect. It somehow displays an urban structure which incessantly suggests social and cultural interactions to the visitor but at the same time leaves the choice to himself.

The vast site of La Villette is structured by 35 red objects, all of them being 10x10x10 metre cubes or three-storey constructions. They were named ‘Folies’ by the architect and every 120 metres people may stumble on such a folly which helps to regain orientation where open space, movement and interaction seem to have merged in a futuristic way.

At the Parc de La Villette the future has just begun, it’s fresh and young for grandparents and grandchildren alike.

(6) Toccata Organ – A Man’s Organ

Posted on September 6, 2016 by Christine

An organ, found and lost

The sentimental value of a technical artifact often survives even if it long ago ended in deadlock and was disposed at the vast graveyard of industrial equipment. This is true for the Toccata Organ, which is a prominent exhibit at the industrial museum ‘Industriesalon Schöneweide’ and the only existing instrument of that kind today.

The technical signature of this organ is “K 2”. This may sound like a backward predecessor model of Starwar’s “R2D2”, but in fact “K 2” was a superbly performing electronic organ and frequently in operation at the Berlin opera house “Komische Oper” from 1961 to 1989. This bulky Toccata Organ, built as a prototype of highest electronic sound quality, needed more than 250 electronic tubes, complex tone generating circuits and special frequency dividers in order to imitate a pipe organ to hence unknown perfection. But tube electronics proved to be a technical blind alley and transistors took over for good. Just four instruments were built, three were lost completely, only “K 2” could be reanimated after it had been dumped by Samsung Electronics and it now remains to tell the story of the Toccata Organ. That was achieved by the very same man who had held the organ alive at the opera for nearly three decades.

The man behind this technical artifact cannot be resurrected like an electronic organ, just his name survives in an explanatory note at a museum, in a booklet or in research papers – until the name has lost its meaning for the next generation. Considering, that all those years at the “Komische Oper” the Toccata Organ was cared for and held alive by a single man as if the electronic instrument had become a part of his own organism, you wonder, if the fully completed separation of man and machine won’t turn machines into cyborg beings on the one hand and, on the other hand, will gradually wipe out man’s ethical self.

(5) Heritage of Loss – Manhood

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Christine

Man Machine, drinking gasoline

“I’m a man machine drinking gasoline” – an appealing song for a male citoyen who maybe lives in a European capital and shares his cool contemporary views via twitter and a weĺl-furnitured literary blog with a fairly non-conformed net community.

While listening to the hammering music for a second time he imagines grimy, athletic bodies, emaciated by some excruciating industrial work slavery – unseen and unheard of in his own ” corridors of knowledge” as he has recently named his academic field of work. He’s a professor of law, a schoengeist, too, but right now he rejoices in conjuring up gasoline-fed, smeared bodies – so hard that he can control them by letting them flex their muscles, bend and stretch their torsos, making them spread their legs like an archaic fighting machine. These creatures are manly through and through, he thinks, but in a defiant way, yes, defying their innate machine ma-scu-li-ni-ty, can you hear me, he shouts. That’s what they do, he rages against the vibrating sub-woofers. They are beyond rules, they don’t obey to written words and healthy nourishment and all that painstakingly documented civilization stuff which he himself carefully pays tribute to, day by day, in his urban life as an educated citoyen.

He watches those machine beings who are the vital, patient slaves of an out-faded enlightenment age. They’ll be guzzling gasoline and toiling like gladiators until their time has come. That will be the day when they spit gasoline into the faces of good-looking, slim urbanites like himself. They will soil him and he will submit gladly. They will reach over for all the pretty glasses full of sparkling champagne, everywhere in those pampered European cities. And they’ll empty them, hurl them, break them and it’ll be the start of their reign, the age of a new manhood and the semi-human man machine.

He sighs, and listens to the next song.”Man machine, semi human being, man machine, super human being”, a somewhat weak promise that the profound abyss between body and humanity may be overcome by a six-pack cyborg homunculus. “Man machine, the evil of a dream”, a dream lost a century ago which is now displayed in museums, on fitness courts and in art-house movies.

He turns the volume down, looks out of his living room window, takes a photo of the orange-blue sunset which still lingers above the Western spheres of the capital, and sits down at his laptop. He opens his twitter account and uploads the sunset photo, the third one this month. “Too early to go to bed, but in case I won’t have time later on: Good night, everyone. Sleep well.”

Encounters

(4) Heritage of Loss – Cyborgs and all my yesterdays

Image | Posted on July 2, 2016 by Christine

My post-industrial cyborg self…

… is getting inquisitive sometimes…

Where has my humanity gone? Has it left my body? Have I reduced myself to a feeling android? Or has my mind changed into cyborg software which handles my body and soul? But I know I can always press the escape key and stay safe with my human glass shades of feeling such as lighting scented candles when things appear sad or uttering soft noises of pleasure when people look happy.

Glass shade, bluish reflections

Happy, how much I yearn for the blurred happiness of a summer song. It turns the tiniest rest of dried-out happiness into sparkling life. Like sherbet powder tingling on my tongue and vibrating in my veins: Why? I said…

“… because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you know what happiness is to you
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like that’s what you wanna do

Happy, bring me down
Can’t nothing, bring me down
Love is too happy to bring me down
Can’t nothing, bring me down
I said bring me down
Can’t nothing, bring me down
Love is too happy to bring me down
Can’t nothing, bring me down…” (1)

And I repeat that over and over and over again so nothing can bring me down because I’m happy. As long as the coloured lights are blinking and the singing goes on.

Post-industrial landscapes

Afterwards I’m back to some post-industrial site and to all my yesterdays in the inclosures of humanity.

(1) Happy, Pharell Williams

(3) Heritage of Loss – The Power of Tubes

Posted on April 17, 2016 by Christine

Vacuum tubes – still going strong at Industriesalon Schöneweide

Visiting the vast display storeroom at Industriesalon Schöneweide is like entering a sculpture park: You are overwhelmed by the magnitude and strangeness of the objects. The display storeroom (‘Schaudepot’) with a mass of impressive exhibits tells the eventful and multilayered story of electrical engineering at Berlin-Treptow, of the first power plant producing alternating current here, of a cable plant and a transformer station – all of this in three various historical periods in German history. After the “Wende”, when Samsung shut down the place in 2009 and the collection of industrial artifacts from the 1980s was doomed for dumping, some courageous people succeeded in saving this incomparable industrial heritage and founded the Industriesalon Schöneweide as an industrial museum. The transfixed visitor from today’s transistor-based digital world may dwell and rummage at large here and, while doing so, discover the once so powerful kingdom of vacuum valves!

The (nearly) lost kingdom of vacuum tubes

Mostly, the vacuum tube has become obsolete in nowadays technology. Even if tubes are still used at microwave radio frequencies and special hi-fi audio systems sometimes, they have been replaced by an ultra-efficient transistor technology, without any evidence of a tube comeback – except for real audioheads who insist that tubes deliver better audio quality than transistors. So, during the last two decades vacuum tubes have become a cherished part of man’s industrial heritage. When looking at the schematic diagram of a vacuum valve, it’ll perhaps remind you of an illustration showing the interior of an Egyptian pyramid, complete with nicely coloured explanatory hieroglyphs, and in that way it reveals something of the complex process of developing and producing electron tubes on this industrial site.

Eavesdropping onto industrial history at Schöneweide

Of course, everyone knows his lessons on batteries, tubes, transistors and the like, hours which proceeded sluggishly from current to voltage, from anode to cathode, from positive to negative and vice versa, out of the black box and back into. You had to accept the given facts and there was no point in mulling things over – that was meant for the chosen few who would get a job in some future electrochemical laboratory.

Halting in front of a bulky eavesdropping machine, you learn that it had been developed and used in the days of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) for spying on the enemy territory of the Federal Republic of Germany – from the top of GDR mountain Brocken (1.141 m). You look at the weathered photocopy showing the espionage station on the highest peak of the Harz mountain ranges and, yes, some sparks of long forgotten lessons come to mind: A vacuum tube is a device used to amplify and rectify electronic signals. Sure, in those days they needed tubes to spy from mountain heights. Current passing through the filament, or cathode (-), heats it up so that it knocks off electrons which have a negative charge.Why, oh, why? These electrons are attracted to the plate, or anode(+). A grid of wires between the filament and the plate is negative, repels the electrons and thus controls the current to the plate. In this process it will be able to amplify the voltage given to it. Control and miraculous precision!

I take two steps back in the narrow corridor, which has led me to this amazing object, to take in the grandeur of the bulky spying machine. It speaks of a bold engineering spirit – ill-fitting to snoop on other people’s affairs but rather suitable to reach out across borders and exchange ideas on new technologies (like transistors, for example). A kind of “light bulb” moment makes me shake off the repelling spy v. spy stories, may they rest in silence. Instead, I can detect some of the former engineer’s mind in the exhibition and curiously turn to the rows of varied vacuum tubes: Here, the industrial, social and political heritage of a past era has become tangible and alive in a very human way!

(2) Heritage of Loss – A Microwave Brontosaurus

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Christine

Local identity and collective memories

Industrial spaces witness the profound impact of technical activities on people’s socio-economic history and presence. The uniqueness of the heritage left over to future generations reveals a lot about the local process of industrial change. Somehow, each site carries the value of a specific local memory. It’s present not only in the industrial space and environmental background, but just the same in contents, mechanical or technical equipment, in the industrial landscape, its architecture and literature. The everyday lives of different groups of people are ‘recorded’ in the industrial heritage and since everyday life is necessarily attached to a certain place, a kind of local identity clings to the site, even if decades have passed. Some exhibits in the ‘working’ museum Industriesalon Schöneweide, the historical centre of a once large-scale, most modern electronics industry on the outskirts of Berlin, very strongly convey such collective memories and a feeling of local identity.

A Microwave Brontosaurus

Developed in the mid-sixties, this GDR (1) microwave oven was produced towards the end of the sixties. It turned out to be the only GDR prototype – just 140 microwaves ever left the production halls. They were used in restaurants and canteen kitchens.

(1) GDR-German Democratic Republic

Using electron tubes in a microwave oven

The microwave oven was manufactured in a state-owned GDR enterprise, VEB Elektrowärme Sörnewitz. The bulky, head-high oven consists of a cooking cabinet and a large chamber for power supply. The electron tubes were produced at VEB Fernsehelektronik, a factory for television electronics.

Those were high-voltage rectifier tubes and magnetrons, initially being “by- products” of a GDR developing program for radar technology. The heat required is generated by the transformation of magnetic field energy into thermal energy within the food product to be heated or cooked.

Besucherzentrum Industriesalon Schöneweide e.V.,Reinbeckstr.9, 12459 Berlin

(1) Heritage of Loss

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Christine

Industrial heritage – understanding loss and digging into future!

Industrial sites shape landscapes into settlements and communities. Where there used to be nature, agriculture or wasteland you find buildings, plants, architecture, machinery, products, transport, housing – all of which develops like an island sputtered up from the ocean of man’s industrial and commercial instincts. An island that is projected into the future and based on change. If you visit abandoned plants and look at the material remains of former industries, you’ll often sense the massive loss which their decomposition means.

On the vast site of former AEG Schöneweide in Berlin-Treptow, where on rural grounds the industrial empire of AEG rose and collapsed in the course of little more than a century, you may find a sleeping giant. He was left behind in the industrial detritus. In his sleep he looks decrepit and promising at the same time, being sheltered under a neatly painted inscription from our days. The lines “Gib der Kunst Raum, dann wird sich die Schönheit ihrer Seele frei entfalten” (1) sounds like the beginning of an elegy addressed to ancient Greek ruins. The words deny the reality of industrial collapse and instead speak of art, beauty and unfolding of souls. As if the strong sense of abandonment, which is still omnipresent here, has miraculously given way to a new space for people to get started again, differently.

(1) “Lend space to art so that it may unfold the beauty of its soul in freedom”

The ruins of social change are unlikely to raise romantic outbursts as those from ancient days do, particularly not so in affluent modern societies. Maybe the reason lies in the anonymity of the relics. We don’t see the people who once worked the plant but disintegrating industrial material. Moreover, these industrial leftovers are a shameful reminder of social defeat. Adaptive re-use didn’t work out, abandonment became inevitable and now decay has taken over. But however “marooned in time, we should understand that ruins have a value” (2) so that they can remind future generations of a “common wealth” which brought about products, skills and knowledge just as well as work identification and social progress.

So, there are riches in the detritus which the former industrial community has left behind. If the ruins stay, future generations will have the opportunity of digging for them. Obviously, there are enough people who know that they don’t need the deception of the emperor’s new clothes and who get started with genuinely new projects. Walking about on the former industrial sites of Schöneweide you get a feeling that although the past is not yet over some digging into the future has already begun.

Former industrial communities – “(…) these are the nameless people. Our job is to pierce their anonymity so that future generations may understand their extraordinary achievements.The future of these working places is in our hands; to preserve for posterity, to recycle for tomorrow,
or to leave alone so that future generations can make choices for themselves based on our prudence and their values and judgments. We have a choice over whether it is treasure or trash.” (3)

Neil Cossons, Industrial Heritage: Treasure or Trash, Abstract for TICCIH (2), (3)

Glimpses from a backyard

Posted on February 26, 2016 by Christine

St. Mary’s backyard is hibernating in faded colours, with some red flower heads left on a small Fuchsia and violet cabbage leaves in an oval metal tub. An empty terracotta amphora is, of course, no such thing as a Grecian urn but simply a fancy flower pot waiting for the next planting season. Still, the weathered tin can bears the looks of a “foster-child of silence and slow time”. While looking at the gardening remnants, the old church-stones, the climbing creeper, the black cast iron fence and the doorknob of the open gate I am transfixed in a kind of profane eternity: Here I am in St. Mary’s backyard!

Nobody enters, the world is kept outside. Once in while, a mini story is passing by like that…

… blue cart, drawn or pushed by an unseen hand and…

…a hotfoot cyclist pushing the pedals …

… or a reading lady nearly bumping into a bluish shadow behind the creepers…

… but not coming across the tall man lost in thought who isn’t noticing…

… those two hurried fellows whooshing past!

(3) Midway To Somewhere New

Posted on November 10, 2015 by Christine

Refugees, staying here

Politicians are doing theoretical forward and backwards rolls, communication media indulge in reports from the ‘front line’ of the refugee crisis and a roused public opinion is hovering through the streets and sounds like: Watch out, when it comes through your door! Then, there is the people. Just like you and me they have come across the refugees at stations, in front of registration centres or in tents on some operating space. You meet them when you go to work or do your errands or just buy a newspaper. Gradually, you find yourselves in a noticeably changed reality, in a new social role as hosts to a large number of displaced people in your own country. Those huddled masses from TV have arrived right here. You will have to share your lives with them, somehow. How is that to be accomplished? How to encounter these foreigners, dramatically cut off from relatives, friends, values, food, shelter and finding themselves without any resources in our society. How to include the devastating experience of these people’s terrible losses into our own everyday but nonetheless urgent necessities? Obviously, we have to make room for something new and we have to grow something which is eatable. No need to turn away from this unfamiliar challenge, we’ll accomplish something wholesome.

Growing bags in Berlin garden

Why have I ever come here, to this cold, hostile station concourse with its flashy noises and hundreds of pushy people hastening past. I can’t call out to them and I don’t want to, either. I am like a stone, on this cold floor, with the child asleep in my arms in a thermo fleece blanket. Don’t step on me. I am like the beggar on the steps of historic Al Hejaz station, that beggar who I would give some money, when I passed by once in a while. I haven’t gone there for years. They told me there was an explosion which killed a dozen of workers, and others, too. Nobody will sit on those stairs any longer. And who am I now? I couldn’t tell the Egyptian lady who came up to me an hour ago and spoke to me with a kind summer voice. She talked to me in Egyptian Arabic. She looked neat and nice, I would have liked her if I had met her somewhere else. She wanted to give me money, at least for the child, she said pitifully. I know, we look needy, messed-up and miserable after the ordeals of the journey but I don’t want people to notice. I wanted to shout at her. I don’t need your money, no, no, keep it! Don’t look at me! Turn away from us and put your purse back into your handbag, please do! But she insisted, talking patiently, pleading with me that at least she could buy some food. Please tell me what you want, she said, pointing at the shops in the main station. I was infuriated. Who am I to take food from an Egyptian woman, that I don’t know, and who is not even a native on this alien ground. Then, suddenly, she caught my gaze and stopped me in my fury. She said that her name was Dalal. I answered that I didn’t need money but that I needed prayers. And I begged her to pray to God for the people who I left behind. Promise, I demanded. She bent down, stroked my shoulder and promised, using the right words. Her smiling eyes were wet and I wished she could have stayed with me for some more minutes. When she walked away through the large hall I followed her with my eyes. She moved forward steadfastly, with firm steps. Somebody I got to know by name in this strange place, Dalal.

(2) Seeking Refuge

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Christine

Staying somewhere

We live in a society where the term wandering is connected to individual freedom. Having in mind an independent seeker of new paths we don’t realize that those tens of thousands, who have been crossing European borders for more than two months, are wanderers seeking for a new living space. What we see are refugees. The TV camera which is following the endless trek of people from the height of a noisy helicopter, tries to convey the whole picture, the vast, global dimension of a human situation – the refugee crisis. But not even for one single person from that mass of asylum-seekers could we tell how his displacement took place in the beginning or could we foresee how it will be settled in the end. No, we just watch migrant masses who seem to belong nowhere and need to stay somewhere. These images make us shake our heads in resignation: Too many people to be helped, too much asked of me and you, too big a challenge to be coped with. And such is our refugee crisis: we are utterly helpless in the midst of a good life.

Mentha Spicata Var. Crispa (Nana Mint)

I have arrived here in the middle of the night. These are our night lodgings, with two separate big rooms, like camping dorms, taking about 80 to 90 mattresses, no beds. In the lighted entrance hall there is water, cold food, hot beverages, some chairs to sit down for a while before you take a one-way blanket from an elderly refugee helper and find yourself a mattress in one of the darkened dorms. I am with my younger brother. We need to shower and are handed out cleaning utensils, tooth brushes, towels. Everything is stored in open shelves or on tables, so it’s easy to communicate, even without the young male refugee helpers who acted as interpreters and have taken us here from the train station. I look at the piles of towels in the shelf and point at a voluminous red bathing towel right at the bottom of the pile. The woman understands, smiles and takes it out for me. When my brother, who is ahead of me, discovers my red towel he returns to the woman and switches his blue towel for another red one. He makes me laugh, my brother. We wash and shave in the gym showers of a neighbouring school in the backyard. In the last days of the trekking I have grown a beard which is hard to shave off. Some time after my brother and the other men are already back to the night camp I am finally done. I look good, healthier, even though I’ve cut my skin with the unfamiliar shaver. Back in the entrance hall I deposit my used shaving things in a blue garbage bag. A woman standing near looks at me, as if startled. Perhaps she worries about the bleeding cut at my chin. I wave something like ‘no problem’ to her and go to sleep. The mint taste which is still in my palate from the toothpaste reminds me of refreshing nana-tea which at home we used to have after dinner.