ON RUINS AND FALLOWLANDS Excerpts of a conversation between Reinhard Krehl (R.K.), artist, Leipzig, Germany and Bittermann & Duka (B&D), artists, Berlin, Germany, on Dec. 20th, 2001. R.K. Did you know that reinforced concrete was invented by Joseph Monier, a French gardener? 'Plattenwerk' (factory that produces prefabricated slabs for residential buildings) and garden therefore are directly connected. But this decayed, demolished 'Plattenwerk' – is or can this really be a place for a garden? Garden refers to something Arcadian. Could it be Arcadia or is it rather Utopia? B&D: For sure it is a place of a past utopian approach, because architectural details were produced there, which – in the era of the GDR – were composed into buildings that were supposed to construct a new society according to very idealistic ideas. 'Plattenbauten' (buildings made from prefabricated slabs) were at least in the beginning a manifestation of these later nationalized ideals. Additionally, the 'Plattenwerk' is a ruin. And if you understand a garden as an interface between nature and culture, a ruin could be a metaphor for this. In historical garden epochs the image of the ruin was an expression for a certain societal condition, often a Memento Mori or a place with pittoresque qualities – which is interesting for us especially under the aspect of painting. It was a place of traverse without function, that is, a metaphor for the 'open' as well. So, in its ruined condition the 'Plattenwerk' has these qualities of an undefined gap, which optionally works as a mental projection screen for a garden. R.K.: But a garden usually is being taken care for, traditionally. B&D: This is an ideological decision, if you leave a garden to itself and nevertheless define it as a garden or if you carry out human interventions, which formally make it a garden. Maybe the 'Plattenwerk' could be a garden, just by naming it a garden. Maybe in reality it would be possible to turn it into a garden, because the deconstruction of such a huge thing would be tremendously expensive and time-consuming. Under the condition of a great freedom of definition a garden could be a much more interesting solution for this place. R.K.: Does it mean, in this 'maybe' is inherent that you lay no claims to feasibility? This becomes obvious as well in your work when you shift concrete realities onto a pictorial and therefore more abstract level and then transfer it back into another potential reality and thereby gaining new insights . Is the 'Plattenwerk' also a place, where such a shift in meaning could happen? B&D: Just content-wise, of course we think that this 'Plattenwerk' as a residuum of a utopia or rather a parody of a utopian thought might be a good ground for a garden. Additionally, we always liked buildings made from concrete, whether they were bunkers, industrial sites or garden buildings. The fascination for this and also for weathered concrete that is overgrown with moss and lichen – as something earth and stone-like – is an important issue also in our latest project. Therefore, we could easily imagine to dream up a garden for this industrial area and then deal with it on an image level. Of course, everybody has a different approach on that. But I think it would perfectly fit to your work as well to make a garden out of it. On this beautiful summer day we altogether did not stop without reason in front of this pool filled with rainwater. Actually, in there a very vivid biotope of alga, salamanders and leeches between overgrown shock absorbers and mossed polystyrene had developed. Immediately, we all had the feeling that – looked at it from its importance – this could be the new center of this garden, very classical like in Hortus Conclusus. R.K: I think in our work we often look for places, which hold a temporal and spatial fuzziness. And with our mobile gardens we try to clarify exactly these definitions. Therewith we question the ostensive reality of things. And this is what we conceive as garden, as a model of garden. B&D: Since you just mentioned the word 'model': We think – because we also construct models as a potential state that we then display in an image (of course we build models, but the image is always the first place on which we construct a model) – that this whole encounter and this debate we had at the 'Plattenwerk' finally are based on the ground of mental models, that this was the starting point where we began our debate. The 'Plattenwerk' caused questions such as what could we do with it, how could one use it or what kind of place is it at all? Questions that we then tried to answer by models. First of all, we just knew that there was something, which attracted us, which inspired us. And this inspiration was the reason for thinking about places as models, as potential states. Talking about models – Dessau, by the way, is an interesting field. On the one side Wörlitz – where the first English landscape garden in continental Europe integrating even agriculture was created – as a model garden for early forms of democratic thinking. And then the Bauhaus – which moved from Weimar to Dessau and thereby turned its program from an orientation at the Vienna Workshops into a connection with the industry – as a model with finally a global impact. And then, these 'Plattenbauten', the socialist model that should be taken seriously, but it represents itself rather in its breakdown, so to say in its most beautiful breakdown. R.K.: In my memory I can see us again standing around the small pool, staring into the scrap through oily water. There was an effectiveness and a reality and they both do not operate directly. They first have to be put together somehow. B&D: And we are – so to say – the catalysts for this accomplishment. Through our reflexive perspective that we now send out, for instance, in such a conversation, all of a sudden this corroded shock absorber, which – overgrown by alga – appears in a new form gets an attention. The attention we pay to this forgotten, pupated quotidian object is then the poetic moment that lifts this object out of its oblivion and its crappy being and transfers it into a new context of meaning. And so the whole pool, or even the whole 'Plattenwerk' is actually a place of oblivion, which we lift up again from its engrossment through our perspective and which we first of all transgress only in our mind into another reality, not imaginable before.