SYNTHETIC GEOGRAPHIES I

A site specific installation produced as part of

DER BLACK ATLANTIC

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany.September-November 2004

Installation. Three digital projections with audio, canvas, cloth, gravel, glass vitrines and mixed media.

SYNTHETIC GEOGRAPHIES IIA site specific installation produced as part of

DER BLACK ATLANTIC

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany.September-November 2004

Installation:

Self generating digital projec-tion of randomly selected vi-sual and audio clips. Timber hut containing video monitor.

Synthetic Geographies

Synthetic Geographies was a series of site specific installa-tions which were commissioned as part of the project “Der Black Atlantic” at the Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin. “Der Black Atlantic” was an exhibition and German language Publication ex-ploring notions of diasporic exchange generated from Professor Paul Gilroy’s text ‘The Black Atlantic’ (Modernity and Double-Con-sciousness) 1992, in relation to developing Pan-European black presences.

‘Synthetic Geographies I’ explored the historical location of the Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt within the Tiergarten and the wider cityscape of Berlin, as a metaphor for wider themes of imperial expansion, using the Berlin Conference of 1885 as a pivotal point. The resultant mixed media installation employed a three screen video projection, tent material and a portrait of Otto von Bismark in a rural setting, to echo the original use of the site dating from 1745 as the ‘Zeltenplatz’ or ‘place of the marquees’

‘Synthetic Geographies II’ used a projection of a randomly scan-ning digital image of the contemporary landscape of Berlin along with captured local radio sounds to comment upon the consolida-tion of new communities and their impact upon the aural cityscape of a contemporary metropolitan European capital.

Synthetic Geographies. Notes on the theme

The Congress Hall, originally gifted to the city of Berlin by the US Govern-ment in 1957, and now home of the House of World Cultures, stands as a richly encoded site giving testimony to the myriad ways in which locations can be given new conceptual resonance through the shaping and reshaping of geographical space.

The idea of the ‘synthetic’ landscape, pervades parkland in general, but has a particularly rich history in respect to the Tiergarten. Originally guarded as prime hunting ground from the encroachment of the expanding sixteenth cen-tury townscape by royal dictate, the Tiergarten has been physically sculpted and re-sculpted in order to ‘re-present’ contemporaneous notions of the idyllic ‘natural’ space in contrast and opposition to the surrounding fabricated ‘urban’ spaces of the city.

Within that context, the Zeltenplatz was established within the Tiergarten in 1745 as a tentative re-imposition of explicitly fabricated space in the midst of the covertly fabricated park landscape. This came in the form of marquees erected during the summer months as sites of pleasure and entertainment. The marquee in this context is significant. Like the tent from which it is derived, it specifically references the ‘natural’ landscape into which it is designed to tem-porarily nestle. It carries with it resonances of expedition into wild terrain, the military campaign, the excursion in search of the idyll. The tent also carries with it resonances of nomadism and the squatter, those with access to only the most ephemeral, or most transportable of living spaces, notions which were no doubt far from the mind of Frederic the Great or his architect Knobelsdorff. The Marquee can be seen as deliberately teetering on the fuzzy dividing line between the ephemeral and the grand architectural. The marquees of the eighteenth century Zeltenplatz would have proclaimed a bold and aggressive statement to the wild creatures busily colonising the ‘natural’ park-space; That the civil, ordered, designed human-centric architectural spaces of the urban could at any point be re-imposed, re-colonising this point in the landscape of the Tiergarten, even if that act of re-colonisation was temporary, and the archi-tectural grandeur of the marquee an act of ephemeral display.

The use of the former site of the Zeltenplatz, a place of symbolic contest between the urban and the ‘natural’, for the foundation of what would become the Congress Hall and later the House of World Cultures is therefore intrigu-ing.

Conceived as part of the International Building Exhibition (INTERBAU) in 1957, the design work for the building began in 1955 under the architect Hugh Stubbins. Berlin during that period had become a key site in the global con-test of symbolism, language, terrain and resources between a US dominated Capitalist ‘West’ and the ‘East’ which was seen as adhering to a brand of State Socialism derived from the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet Union. The site of the Exhibition, within the western sector of Berlin, but literally within view

of the Soviet controlled sector was inevitably seen as a key symbolic location within this contest. It was with this in mind that the decision was made to literally re-engi-neer the physical terrain which was once the Zeltenplatz, re-sculpting it as a small hill, burying its past and creating a new ‘natural’ contour in the landscape. The New Con-gress Hall was then erected at the summit of this new geographical feature with the specific intention that it should be visible from the Soviet controlled sector and should ‘serve as a symbol and beacon of freedom’. In words sampled from Benjamin Frank-lin, of particular significance here, as a foundation bearing his name commissioned the building, and in an echo of the symbolic colonisation of ‘natural’ space attempted by the marquee’s of the Zeltenplatz, the New Congress Hall was an attempt to declare that ‘this is my country’.

This assertion took on of course even greater significance when in 1961 the western sectors of Berlin were enclosed by a wall constructed on the orders of Walter Ulbricht. West Berlin became the literal embodiment of the encampment, the outpost, the mar-quee erected as a visible symbol of presence in the midst of hostile terrain. It could be argued that the artificially enclosed terrain of West Berlin acting as a garden of capital-ism amidst the wilderness of the planned economies of Eastern Europe and preserved at great expense by the sponsoring governments of the west, mirrored the meticulously preserved terrain of the Tiergarten as a synthesised representation of rural space at the heart of the urban landscape. This was once again mirrored by the Zeltenplatz as a one time ‘civil’ tented enclave artificially carved out from the ‘natural’ landscape of the Tiergarten. The Congress Hall emerges therefore as prime conceptual and symbolic location within discourses around the synthetic manipulation of terrains, both physical and geopolitical and by implication, the tyranny of mapping as a virtual projection of power.

As Benjamin Franklin said ‘THIS IS MY COUNTRY’

Berlin was of course also the site of one of the most notorious examples of the syn-thetic manipulation of geographic terrain in history. In the case of the Berlin Confer-ence of 1884-5, the act of synthetic manipulation was also a virtual one. Using the new technology of cartography, representatives of Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Russia, the USA, Portugal, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium and Turkey sat around a conference table and carved up the map of the still largely un-colonised African Continent into European spheres of influ-ence. Much has been written about the arrogance and brutal arbitrariness of this act which utterly disregarded pre-existing cultural and linguistic boundaries and in effect conjured ‘synthetic’ nations into being. The resultant legacies of conflict and forced nomadism as communities are unearthed and displacement is well documented. The instability of these nations can be seen as being further exacerbated on a local level by the forced imposition of new ecosystems caused by the displacement of local agricul-ture, forna and flora, and the carving out of the synthetic landscape of the cash crop plantation. The plantation thus begins to emerge as the ugly sister of the idyllic park-land.. both can be seen as spaces manufactured to serve the interests of a ruling elite and are often preserved as spaces mapped out in opposition the surrounding terrain.

Keith Piper. 2004