Sarcophagi for the World of Tomorrow
Since
July 21, side by side with cultural treasures from the past, 50 works of
art lie buried in Germany's most famous mineshaft in Oberried, near
Freiburg. The conceptual artist Adalbert Hoesle invited German colleagues
to a Swallowing in which the works of art are placed under UNESCO
protection for 1,500 years. Harald Fricke was there for db artmag
as the art was getting ready for its journey.
Entrance to the Barbara Shaft in Oberried, Photo: Harald Fricke
Just before you get to
Oberried, the exit is blocked. A fireman waves the car over to the side of
the road; a little while later, he lets the driver enter the narrow street
leading up the hill, after all. Five hundred meters on, however, the route
is finally blocked; too many cars - and tourist buses - are crowding the
small parking lot not far from the
Barbara Shaft.
Over 200 people have arrived at the former silver
mine, which extends for miles into the cliffs of the
Schauinsland at the edge of the high Black Forest near Freiburg. A German
charitable agency, the
Arbeiterwohlfahrt, has set up a large garden tent, and there's goulash
soup and draft beer at an improvised counter. Two guitarists are checking
the microphones of the hi-fi equipment. Oberried is celebrating the
Swallowing: the conceptual artist
Adalbert Hoesle, who considers himself a
"retrogradist," invited 50 German artists, of whom almost half
are represented in the Deutsche Bank Collection, to participate in the
project. Now, people from the surrounding villages and a crowd of
journalists and TV teams plus a good dozen participating artists are
waiting to see what the ZBO-SdM 052004 - Subductive Measures is all
about.
Arrival of the artworks for the "Swallowing. Photo: Harald Fricke
Behind the strange title is an action that's been in the planning for a long
time already. On the occasion of the 50-year anniversary of the
Hague Convention, which administers the "protection of cultural goods in
the case of armed conflict," 50 containers are being interred in the
Barbara Shaft. Their contents: contemporary art. During the planning phase
Hoesle visited a number of colleagues and invited them to produce a new
work or to provide an already existing work to be deposited in the Barbara
Shaft for 1,500 years in a sealed stainless steel container as a part of
the cultural heritage under
UNESCO protection. The act is meant to pay special tribute to art - the
most important cultural treasures of German history are stored in the same
location on microfilm:
Otto the Great's coronation certificate from 936, the blueprint of the
Cologne Cathedral, Pope
Leo X's papal bull from June 15 1520, threatening
Martin Luther with banishment, and the contract text of the
Peace of Westphalia from 1648.
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Adalbert Hoesle unloading the container.
Photo: Maria Morais
The Barbara Shaft near Oberried is indeed extraordinary. It's the only place
in Germany where a central storage area for culturally and historically
valuable archival material enjoys special protection; duplicates are
stored here to escape potential loss due to natural catastrophe or war.
This was the goal of the Hague Convention, which was signed in 1954
following the experiences of the First and Second World Wars and has since
been signed by almost 100 countries. Egypt marked the beginning in 1955,
The Federal Republic of Germany joined on August 11 1967, and in the past
four years, The People's Republic of China, Rwanda, and El Salvador, among
others, have entered the protection agreement. In Germany, experts have
been working on securing the country's storage since 1961: two stainless
steel cylinders 55 yards in length each are kept at an average temperature
of 50 degrees Fahrenheit and 60 percent humidity in two chambers of the
shaft at a depth of 445 yards. Each container holds up to 16 large rolls
of film material, each of which consists of 1,689 yards of microfilm -
amounting to nearly 16 miles of painstakingly photographed documents per
container. A glance at the shelves stacked with containers offers an
impression as to just how much historical knowledge is present here:
following the Reunification in 1990, an additional nine million yards of
film with valuable archival material from the GDR alone was added to
prevent this history from becoming lost.
At least for the next 500
years. According to scientific research, this is the span of time that
microfilm can be used as a storage medium without damage to the
information. Whatever happens next is something no one can know:
presumably, the celluloid will gradually dissolve, leaving it completely
useless for the distant future. But who knows what's going to happen in
the next 500 years, anyway - when even the original
Luther Bible still hasn't reached this ripe old age?
Still unloading the Container, Photo: Maria Morais
On the other hand, if Hoesle's concept works, then the art might survive well
beyond the rest of the information stored. In the end, the wooden log that
Christoph Schlingensief stored in his container as a relic of last year's
Sitzpfahl performance is far more robust than any strip of film could
be. In the case of the Cologne-based artist
Rune Mields, her interest in numbers and systems is a well-known fact, and
her drawing series The World's Numerical Systems is presumably
based on this.
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