Never Memorize Poems in Landscape Leeway

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The artists of the German-Nigerian project question mutual strategies of collective memory processes in two very different regions and continents. Their artistic interest lies in the connections between devastated landscapes, the erection of monuments (“usable past”) and forms of collective memory in two mining regions. In Lusatia, the gradual phase-out of lignite mining was decided and started in 2017. Enugu in south-eastern Nigeria has been losing more and more of its energy and industrial importance for 15 years. Stripped of their economic utility and function, the former mining regions remain as “landscapes” and change – here as well as there. The possible transformations of both places – towards a designed cultural landscape or a re-appropriation by a wildly rampant nature – are up for discussion. There is an inseparable connection between landscape and change.

The exhibition shows the individual approaches and different strategies of three artistic positions from Lagos and Berlin and their relationship to the change of landscape, the constructions of utopias, memories and fictions from music and image.

Abraham Oghobase from Lagos visually juxtaposes both areas and questions the future of the transforming post-mining landscapes of Lusatia, which could resemble the abandoned present sites of present-day Enugu in the future. His daringly romantic combinations of large-scale photographs and charcoal drawings suggest the possibility of a landscape that can be imagined as free from exploitation, cultural destruction or exploitation.

Constanze Fischbeck understands the current state of the two mining regions as “landscapes for a time”. These symbolise a present in which landscapes and places change faster than human memory can process.

Music, on the other hand, stores memories and evokes emotions about lost places and people. In her video installation, the viewer finds himself between the landscapes in Lausitz and Enugu, which are united by a common soundtrack.

Discoteca Flaming Star (Cristina Gómez Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer) have developed another chapter of their film cycle “Ingrid”, which they have been making since 2003, especially for the exhibition, in which they send their protagonist through the former mining landscape of Lusatia, which in the viewer’s eye could transform into a heroic North American landscape. The fragment, entitled “Landscape Leeway”, is part of a horror comedy that begins in Lusatia and possibly ends in Enugu via sunken village ruins …

So how do transformations of place change our visual and oral narratives – between documentation and fiction – that constitute the space of a place?

In the spatial dispositif of the three artistic approaches, Galerie Nord becomes a venue for the complex relationship between nature, landscape and change, the transmission of cultural heritage and history, and geopolitical utopias.

With the kind support of the district funding and the Fund for the Presentation of Contemporary Art of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and the Goethe-Institut in Lagos.

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