zerfliessende Ge-schichte

The day I climbed down the ladder into the depth of the heavy load-bearing cylinder’s lower measurement chambers, I encountered this rusty piece of metal. It was part of the remains of the instruments used to measure the reaction of the soil to the immense weight of the cylinder. The handwriting of decay had transformed the corroding piece of metal into what I think looks similar to an acrylic pouring but schematically also resembles a vertical cut through a geological profile. The different layers distinguish themselves by color: a dark grey, a reddish brown, and a golden yellow. Schwarzrotgold? These layers flow into each other and their expansion is not clean-cut but quite messy. The geotechnical engineers mapping out the soil layers underneath Berlin for Speer encountered a similar earthen ground structure. History herself, I believe, can be mapped out like this, in layers that coincide and enrich or contaminate each other. At the cylinder, a complexity of historical layers are intertwined: (geo-)technological history, architectural history, the history of violence and suffering, and many more. Technological history, motivated by the human desire to analyze and subdue the earth, architectural history, motivated by the desire to protect us against the forces of nature, and the history of violence and suffering, motivated by the will to dominate and control others for one’s own benefit: the forced laborers ordered to cut the stones and put together the gigantic monuments of German fascism and the earth bearing the weight of human hubris and enduring her penetration through human instability….