TRÄUME DER LAUSITZ

A post-industrial, post-human landscape: In 1989, Peter Rocha

shot a first harrowing description of the extent of destruction left

behind by brown coal surface mining in The Pain of Lusatia. Bernhard

Sallmann – who has now completed his own Lusatia trilogy – sees himself

in this tradition, though he shows a landscape that is wounded and at

the same time enchanted, and people who re-invent themselves and the

land. Where the eye registers a moonlike crater landscape and a desert

crisscrossed by hissing pipes, they see harbour basins and a chain of

lakes, dream up new forests, experiment with boulders, build floating

houses or tirelessly circle the huge mining lakes on all kinds of sports

equipment. They follow the tracks of the wolves that are reconquering

Lusatia even as the people are leaving. Those who stay behind rarely

have work, even if they are highly qualified. Retired engineers transmit

signs of life in Morse code from their shrinking residential estates. One thing is clear: the desert is alive.

In the best tradition of Benning, Börres Weifenbach’s carefully framed

images, which create their own narrative level, supply the futuristic

framework for a handful of visionaries. The heirs of Prince von Pückler,

the great dreamer and landscape architect, in a science fiction film about home. (Catalogue Leipzig, 2009)