(Installation) Ausschnitte aus EDEN/Extracts from EDEN – PhotoIreland 2012
July 8, 2012 § 2 Comments
‘untitled’, section(map), Cottbus, Lausitz, Eastern Germany (glass slide, single projection)
Angelika, Tagebauarbeiterin, Tagebau Jaenschwalde, Lausitz, Eastern Germany, July 2008 (still, two-channel digital video, looped)
Having first visited the region in late 2003, seeking the impact of global capital in a periphery of Europe, as had been experienced in my native Ireland, I quickly realised that it was in fact the antithesis of this experience. Prior to the global economic collapse, but as evidenced by the above prophetic words of Marco, I encountered an emptying and the recognition that the same globalising forces which had transformed unrestrained the landscape of my origins, were indeed transforming this landscape through its forces of withdrawal and seepage – a globalised hemorrhaging. As a result, jobs were and continue to go further East while its younger population migrates to the West and in 2007, the Lausitz came last in a national survey addressing future prospects.
‘untitled’ (empty housing project in process of being dismantled), Neu Schmellwitz, Cottbus, Lausitz, Eastern Germany, August 2007 (glass slide, single projection
Informed by ethnographic understandings and incorporating audio digital video, photography, cross-generational testimony and artefactual material, the project has been constructed in the context of a landscape shaped by and inscribed with the utopic ideological aspirations of modernity – industrialisation, socialism and now at great cost, globalisation. In totality, the region invokes Marshall Berman’s ‘wounds of modernity’ resulting from the ‘cycles of destruction’ necessary for the functioning of capital. A pivotal emphasis for the project, is the catalyst for the region itself, the Tagebau and critically viewing it as perhaps a metaphor for late capitalism – finite, fragile and ultimately, unsustainable.
The production of the project has been generously supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.
Further information and location of exhibition available here.
Video documentation of the installation of the project as part of Encontros da Imagem in Braga, Portugal in 2011 can be viewed here.
Ausschnitte aus EDEN/Extracts from EDEN (installation image, Braga, Portugal, 2011, photograph courtesy Jorge Inacio)
THE MARKET 
[…] and respresentation of labour and globalised space in Ireland’s newly indus- trialised landscape. AUSSCHNITTE AUS EDEN/EXTRACTS FROM EDEN (Arts Council of Ireland 2011), sited in a declining mining and industrial region of the former East Germany, evidenced the uneven- […]
[…] of projects, to date, including, SOUTHERN CROSS (1999-2002), The Breathing Factory (2002-2006), Ausschnitte Aus EDEN/Extracts from Eden (2003-2009) and THE MARKET (2010-) and a means to update on a new project, alongside ongoing events, […]