SoTheseAreThings

artandsciencejournal:

Luftschloss [Cloud Castle]

In this piece Anna Borgman and Candy Lenk combine art and architecture. As they describe the piece, which means Cloud Castle, they state,

“For us the installation oscillates between permanence and volatility, the grounded tectonics of a construction site and the placeless hovering of a cloud. This installation is about unrealised plans and the atmosphere of unfinished places. It is about an in between state that becomes permanent. We are interested in the transitional form as a final gestalt of object and place.”

The work is visually stunning, but there’s a message behind the aesthetics. “It is a reaction of the atmosphere in a satellite town of Berlin. This town with the name Hellersdorf stands for one of East-Berlin‘s largest new housing developments started in 1979. By the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, construction had not been completed; only 34.000 of 46.000 apartments were finished. During the 1990s the neighbourhood centre, Helle Mitte, was constructed to further develop the area. Most of the building construction had been completed by 1998. Due to the bankruptcy of the development agency and missing public funds, especially the planned improvements to the public realm remained incomplete and have shaped the unfinished image of  the place ever since.”

For more on their work, click here. 

- Lee Jones