Kategorie: event

Film: Sun under ground (DE 2022, 39 Minutens)

SUN UNDER GROUND is an essayistic film about uranium mining in Saxony and Thuringia during the GDR era. […]Based on conversations with environmentally committed activists, local residents and former miners, our film takes an ecological-political inventory that traces the element of uranium in local mining museums, in archive materials, underground and in today’s restored landscapes. In our film, uranium is thematized as a substance that repeatedly returns to the place and circumstances of its extraction. As cancer in the lungs of the workers, in the form of the cloud that blows over from Chernobyl in April 1986 or under the top layer of the grass-covered slag heaps. This gives uranium a ghostly quality that returns cyclically and points to a temporality that goes far beyond the human scale and and refers to the incompleteness of the atomic age. (Mareike Bernien and Alex Gerbaulet)

Reading: Der Kletterpilz am Ende der Welt. Kindheiten in der Folgelandschaft.

Elisabeth Heyne and Alexander Wagner read from their text “Der Kletterpilz am Ende der Welt. Kindheiten in der Folgelandschaft.” In it, they describe their upbringing after reunification as both a personal and a collective experience. They are able to capture the developments of a country, families, nature and landscape and show that these cannot be separated from one another. Radiant mushrooms shoot out of the ground next to mushroom-shaped climbing frames. New Philips televisions are installed in VEB-fabricated cupboard walls. First coal and ore are mined, then jobs are cut. Landscapes are excavated, abandoned, flooded naturally or artificially. Plants and animals find a habitat in the new landscapes.

The text was published in summer 2024 as part of the anthology “Ostflimmern. Wir Wende-Millenials” published by Mitteldeutscher Verlag. Previously, Deutschlandfunk broadcasted the joint audio essay “Hühner, Kohle, Kernkraftwerke. Gibt es ein ostdeutsches Anthropozän?” about the traces that industry, energy politics and environmental damage of the GDR have left behind in East German soils.

Elisabeth Heyne was born in Görlitz in 1988 and is a literary scholar who runs the project “Changing Natures. Collecting the Anthropocene together” at the Natural History Museum in Berlin. The collection of everyday objects that give an account of human influence on nature can be completed by everyone. In her academic work, she deals with science communication and the history of knowledge as well as concepts of collections, nature and culture in the Anthropocene, including in East Germany.

Alexander Wagner was born in Hoyerswerda in 1987 and wrote his doctoral thesis on the continuities of German colonialism under National Socialism. At the University of Wuppertal, he researches and teaches on topics including East German concepts of the body and energy culture. He works with artists and academics as a freelance curator, for example on the Ostschule project, which also made a stop in Chemnitz in 2023 after Freiberg and Bielefeld.

Sonne Unter Tage (Filmstill), ©Pong Film – Mareike Bernien und Alex Gerbaulet

It is widely known that smoking industrial plants, masses of cars, nuclear power plants and mountains of plastic are harmful to the climate. But what about digitalization, this supposedly invisible and immaterial hope-bearing technology?

The artworks by Simon Weckert and Ulrich Formann at NEW ECOLOGIES use data-based media art strategies to draw attention to overlooked climate impacts. Weckert’s artwork “Emission of the Cloud”, for example, emits smoke that symbolizes the amount of CO₂ that can be traced back to the hourly internet usage of all Chemnitz residents. Ulrich Formann’s sculpture “Slotmachine” calculates the empty flights in real time, which only serve to hold usage rights at airports, and displays them on a large display board. With his film “Brute Force”, artist Felix Lenz explores the effects of our data-based, digital age on ecology and landscape, while also demonstrating sustainable alternatives with his self-hosted and solar-powered website.

Ulrich Formann, Simon Weckert and Felix Lenz will present their work on the last evening of the exhibition and discuss the challenges and strategies of artistic engagement with the less visible effects of current digitalization and possible alternatives. The event will be moderated by Amelie Buchinger, who works as a research assistant at the Research Centre for Techno-aesthetics at the AdBK Munich and is doing her doctorate at Leuphana University Lüneburg with a thesis on the media cultural history of digital decarbonization

Between the contributions, there will be space and time to talk about the repressed effects of our current digitalization, but also about possible alternatives.

Reinhard Krehl is an artist and walk researcher. In his practice, he explores how order and disorder shape our perception. His works question scientific systems and everyday experiences. He uses Strollology to capture the poetic and anarchic freedom of nature, challenging traditional botanical classifications. For Reinhard Krehl, nature acts as an ambassador in each of its forms. The artist himself becomes an ambassador, a mediator between nature and man, who sharpens our view of nature and shows us what we can learn from it.

For the earthworks, Reinhard Krehl explores the migration history of various plants discovered on the Sonnenberg and their social attributions.

In the past, water was dammed for mills at the Neumühlenwehr. In 1990, a protest was held there to draw attention to the devastating situation of the Chemnitz River. “The Chemnitz River should live again” was written by activists on a banner that they stretched along the dam. At the same time, they fished in the biologically dead river with gas masks on their heads. As part of the art exhibition NEW ECOLOGIES Gegenwarten II, Begehungen e. V. has recreated this action 34 years later and thus questions the current and past state of climate activism.

The environmental groups in the GDR, often organized around churches, published self-organized texts and campaigned for endangered species such as hedgehogs, dying forests such as in the Ore Mountains, unprotected open garbage dumps or air polluted by industry such as in Karl-Marx-Stadt. They were observed and repressed by the state security services. In the 1990s and noughties, environmental and nature conservation groups such as Greenpeace, NABU and BUND became part of the social consensus. A new generation such as the Fridays for Future movement was initially met with a similarly open response. As action against the climate crisis became more urgent and the protests consequently more pressing, the mood changed and groups such as the Last Generation were attacked as “Klimakleber”. With the so-called farmers’ protests, another ecologically extremely relevant group, farmers, spoke out. However, their protests were quickly appropriated by the radical right.

On the occasion of the artwork “Der Chemnitzfluss soll wieder leben – 1990 re-enacted” by Begehungen e. V., we would like to talk about the transformation of environmental protests and climate activism in (East) Germany and ask what it took then and now to make change possible. To this end, representatives of different groups and generations will come together.

With Manfred Hastedt, Doro Sterz, representatives of the Last Generation Chemnitz and Lars Neuenfeld

Manfred Hastedt was active in the GDR in the context of the church environmental and peace movement and was particularly concerned with species extinction, air pollution and forest dieback. From 1990-2021, he ran the Chemnitz Environmental Center, the only one of its kind in Saxony, in the former headquarters of the State Security in Henriettestrasse. He currently organizes and documents the role of the environmental movement in the GDR and is active in Local Agenda 21

Dorothee Sterz, 27, a trained farmer, works in dairy farming on a mixed farm in central Saxony. She is involved in the Arbeitsgemeinschaft bäuerliche Landwirtschaft (Working Group for Rural Agriculture) and is committed to pasture farming and a structurally rich landscape.

Hans Hiersemann is active in the Last Generation Chemnitz.

Matthias Döhler is a freelance architect in Chemnitz and chairman of the Begehungen e.V. association. The art festival of the same name takes place annually in special and neglected locations in Chemnitz.

The event takes place on the terrace of Restaurant Malula at Georgstraße 21. In case of bad weather, we move it to the Hot Super project space at Brühl 71
The Language is German

Japanese knotweed proliferates on the banks of the Chemnitz, in allotments and along railway tracks. What consequences does a self-evolving nature have for our understanding of ‘native’ and ‘foreign’? What do we mean by nature and culture when agricultural land is farmed monoculturally and animals retreat to urban centres?

The artist Tue Greenfort has been dealing with our environment for years. In the form of sculptures, interventions and archival exhibition strategies, he has explored cultivated grains, polluted lakes and the relationship between humans and animals. Instead of saving our idea of a healed and untouched nature, he shows which ideologies are hidden in our view of nature and where humans intervene in supposedly unaffected nature. In Chemnitz, he has created a sculpture that refers to the ambivalent plant Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica). He will be presenting his artistic approach on the 14th of September.

Cord Riechelmann is a biologist, lecturer, publicist and author and has written several books on nature and the human relationship to it. In ‘Krähen. Ein Portrait’ (Matthes & Seitz, 2023), he focuses on the myth-laden, clever bird species. ‘Wald’ (Merve, 2019) asks why, in the Roman Empire, philosophy and political underground groups, the forest was often understood as something radically different, but rarely actually visited. In ‘Wilde Tiere in der Großstadt’ (Nicolai, 2004), he traces new animal habitats. In Chemnitz, he will talk about the problem of invasive or so-called ‘’foreign‘’ species and their current ideological utilisation.

Language: German

The Chemnitz, Kamenica, was once freely meandering, stony and rich in species, then straightened, hidden and polluted, it became the driving force behind the industrialisation of the city. In response, Margrethe Pettersen, Maia Birkeland, Dana Tomečková and Christina Disington perform a healing, cleansing ritual in the Chemnitz River. The video documentation of the performance will be shown repeatedly from 3 – 7 pm. The quiet spot by the Kappelbach invites you to linger and relax.

Photo: Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz/graukarte.info