work in progress and call for collaboration:

In this project, in which I explore the forest as a space of poetic moments ruled by time and light, I find resonance with architects like Le Corbusier, Bernard Rudofsky and Aldo Rossi, as well as with artists such as Rembrandt, Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Schinkel. This site shows only parts of the material, I collected during this 3-year long process and will be updated every now and then, as the project develops. My dream is to find collaborations to develop this body of work, containing photographs, graphics, field recordings, and found objects, further into a book, an exhibition, or such.

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The Architecture Of The Forest
a visual essay accompanied by the poem, ‘Nightingale or The Substance Of The Night‘

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Nightingale

or: The Substance Of The Night

The night is small and dense.
The night sinks in around noon.

As soon as the sun has reached its zenith,
the cold of the night sinks in again.

It slowly sinks back into the substances.
It sinks into the cloudy body of the atmosphere,
into the salty crystals of the oceans,
creeps into the soils of the lands,
no matter if they’re wet, dry, soft or hard.

It sinks in
to the wood of the trees,
the leafs,
the little straws of the grasses,
the mushy fruits of mushrooms,
the flesh,
the blood of birds,
fishes,
mammals,
in to everything on the planet, which is made of physical matter.

It saturates the sunlight,
making it dark
and heavy
and golden,
evoking levels of melancholia.

Rising to oblivion,
finally the weight of the night pushes the sun over the horizon.

The day is forgotten,
the night inhabits every particle on the dark side of this planet.

Everything is different now.

There are day and night versions of every thing existing.
A day and a night forrest
A day and a night ocean
A day and a night highway
A day and a night factory
A day and a night house
A day and a night neighbourhood.
A day and a night city.

Day and night, two oscillating worlds.
The night being pushed beyond the twilight zone by the photons of the sun,
whereas the day will be soaked by the cold, wet night, sinking in when the world is about to turn.

At night more particles have to fit in less space.
Friction is increased by this compression.
Senses are heightened by fear and anxiety,
boundaries of darkness define intimate lands of only a few,
even if any,
square feet.

Light is scarce food for the eye
the mind madly extrapolates between reality and fiction.
When you walk everything that exists is that you are walking here.

The night emphasises “hereness”.

This house is hidden by the forest.
A black hostile mass embraces the dim lit sleeping house.
It blocks the view towards an inexistent landscape.
It presses on the windows,
the walls,
the roof
the soul.

In front of a window,
an indecisive light reveals a tiny part of the world.
A diorama silenced by double glazing.

A lightbulbs light fades according to the distance to its source.
It draws the world towards its dense and hot centre.
A save haven drifting in the black substance of the ocean of the night,
supported by photonic structural integrity.
A counteract to the dark mass,
a space produced by the tension between the push and the pull
fighting each other
in every single one of the endless immaterial light fibres.
Dark matter,
the cold absence of light is weighing on these beams,
compressing them,
intensifying the heat in the centre,
intensifying the contrast between light and eternal blackness,
towards the climax of the night,
defining a more and more articulated space of light.

Bluish invisible rain is playing the surfaces of the newly rendered world.

The Architecture Of The Forest

Each time I visited my parents during the pandemic, I took long walks in the forest. In this project, I am exploring my thoughts about the formal language and poetic power of this space. It documents a non-linear meandering process touching upon notions of fire, water, light, scripture, language, and human-non-human relationships. All Photographies are taken at UNESCO-Biosphärenreservat Schaalsee.

I wanted to capture the architectural dialectic between our human-built environment and the natural. I approached this project with Aldo Rossi’s Architecture of The City at the back of my head. I was looking for these historical, almost metaphysical imprints he describes for the city inside the forest. I surely didn’t think of the forest as something constructed but as something that grew over time, resting on the remains of its own history. When Rossi writes about the underlying structures of the spatial configuration of Florence or other Italian cities, he does not talk explicitly about architecture as the built structures existing at a specific time. He talks of it as a manifestation of a process that can be re-read and has an imprint on the structures to come.

The architecture of the city and the architecture of the forest have in common one powerful master builder.
Namely, time itself.

With this mindset, I went into the forest. The images which we see now, are an approach to translate Aldo Rossi’s view upon the city into a view upon the forrest space and vice versa. For me, it seems as if time does not exist in the images. And yet, they impart a sense of irretrievableness.

Besides the actual organisation of the forests structure, which could be examined empirically from bottom to top and more or less easily,

this ambiguous notion of the existence and inexistent of time is that unpredicted something, “what we don’t know we will bring from there”, in a ‘Salgadoian’ sense:

“As photographers we know where we are going, but we don’t know what we will bring from there.”

Sebastião Salgado

First Hour Of 2021

In A Nature Reserve In The North Of Germany

I like to imagine, how every year a tidal wave travels around the globe, flooding the atmosphere with light and sound, washing away the worries and concerns of the passing year. However, there lies a certain contradiction in the idea of celebrating a new cycle of life, by disrupting all non-human life. And yet, the gesture of the grass straws, where the recorder was placed, visually resemble the gesture of the soaring fireworks. A beautiful example of how multilayered the reality of our world can present itself.

KAINSMAL

Here, a small animal has carved traces in a piece of wood, expressing its own formal language. The abstract image, remotely reminiscent of an urban planning black plan, is based on the work of the unknown little animal.

As in the organically grown city the paths are written in the material that tells of life.
Life means dying, leaving traces, that can only be read by other living beings:

The human world consists of two worlds, which must exist in only one Timespace, which is the human body. It consists of the intellectual and the physical world – Philosophy and Physics. Their incompatibility, which is compressed inside me, is creating this ambivalent friction that ignites the fire of madness, that we call artistic expression.

There are Broken Trees, And There Are Broken Columns.

The forest is on fire every day. After their journey through the deep, cold space of the universe, the photons that left the sun about eight minutes ago transform the forest into a space of poetic moments.

At first, I am an Artist and therefore concerned primarily with aesthetics. Secondly, I am a philosopher and therefore concerned with questions about my relationship to the world. And thirdly, I am trained as an architect and therefore concerned with the manifestation of my subjective experience in time and space.