Since I last wrote on Saturday I have realised that some of the things I was so sure of at that time are not really working in the way that I supposed. But I am still exploring the city and having ideas, so many ideas, but they are coalescing and resolving through my experiments in the studio. I feel a slight element of panic creeping up on me as I realise I have less than three weeks left here in Berlin. Somehow three months would always be better than 2, allowing for settling in, getting started and then having more time to reflect and develop. However, when I return to England in August I can continue, without the distraction of Berlin all around me.
Berlin is still throwing up new spaces and places. Still growing before my eyes, full of unbelievable, huge, buildings and vistas. On Sunday I cycled out to the Olympic Stadium, it is almost a straight line for about 5 miles, nearly flat, that could not happen in London. As I cycled back I could see Alexandar Platz straight ahead, getting bigger as I approached. This kind of scale distorts distance, the same thing happens in vast natural landscapes. You feel that you have nearly reached a point ahead, only to realise that you are still far from it.
Something similar happened recently at Sans Soucci (the vast pleasure gardens and summer palace complex of the Hohenzollerns in Potsdam). Walking down the central avenue towards the Neue Palais it seems quite near until you realise just how huge it is and how tiny the people approaching it are.
This is exactly what I was thinking about before I came to Berlin, this vertiginous, dizzying hugeness. Distorting our sense of scale and self. It happened again yesterday on a visit to Gropiusstadt. The high tower block there is just unbelievably tall. So Kings and Dictators and Urban Designers have shaped the landscape of Berlin, making us all feel as tiny as the figures in a David Friedrich painting.
I also made a tour of rubble mountains this week. I saw the Teufelsburg from the clock tower at the Olympic Park. I mentioned this in a previous post, a “mountain” made from rubble collected, by women, after the 2nd world war and shipped out by rail to west of the city. Today it looks like a natural feature, covered with trees, standing above the flat flood plain of the Spree. Then on Tuesday I cycled up to Gesundbrunnen and out to Friedrichshein which both have Bunker burgs, now moulded into the landscape of the parks, but there are huge scarps of concrete jutting through the undergrowth. A squashed city of fear, flattened by the forest.
What forests surround Berlin, a primordial vastness of flat green colour interspersed with lakes and rivers. A half formed landscape, stretching out across central Europe. There is nothing like this in England. My friend says he has seen wolf tracks in the forest quite close to Berlin. Inspired by him and reading Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, I must get into it. So far I have only seen it from above, as I fly into Schonefeld, from the Muggelturm in the East and the Bell Tower in the West. And there in the middle of this green sea the Fersehenturm stands proud, dwarfing everything, city and nature, you can make of that what you will.
Meanwhile back in the studio I have been playing with photographs in Photoshop, reflecting and expanding them. I am also continuing to keep a map diary and I am having ideas about how these shapes could become three dimensional.
