The Devils Hill.
The caption says…’The Teufelsberg Formation was built of war rubble including concrete, brick, clinker, rock, fly ash, slag and solid chemical waste, deposited between 1950 and 1972, forming the highest elevation of Berlin. Thin Holocene deposits may locally separate the Pleistocene and Anthropocene units.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teufelsberg
The allies raised Berlin in 1945. I watched a PBS thing which showcases how the cities of Le Havre, London, Berlin and Warsaw were destroyed during World War II and then rebuilt, using archival footage, visual effects and first-hand witnesses who contributed to the cities’ rebirths.
I did a search and came across the header image of the substrate of the Holocene, overburdened with a man-made hill 80m high of the detritus of war, put there to make space to rebuild Berlin, and if moved industrially, replete with the dead, humans, children, men and women, and it was quite shocking.
At the moment I am trying to write an academic thing about art as research, and the theme is the ideas of the New Materialists, Donna Haraway, Karen Bard, Rosi Braidotti and my favourite Jane Bennett, you know, Gordons sister.
There is a lot to it but the hu-man centred world, The Anthropocene, features highly. Like, the idea that, by being just centred about ourselves as hu-men in a world made of inert matter and dumb animals and even more dumb plants, protista and protazoans, all there for our taking, might be a bit of problem. Humanism, us at the centre of the cosmos, might be best left behind through an idea of post-humanism, where we share the world with the more than human world and vibrant matter, makes sense.
But that line in Hi Ren… “You got to kill you if you wanna kill me…” rang a bell. If bad Ren is the one making us make war, and making a wasteland of the world, then bad Ren is right, you got to kill you if you wanna kill me… we will kill ourselves short term to live with ourselves long term. I s’pose that is evolution, seeing as 99.9% of all living species are now dead. If we go post-human will we, by will of our newly shared more than human world nature, just become a man-made hill 800m high of the detritus of war and call it evolution. Like Woody Allen said, “I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be around when it happens.”
A theme developed in post-humanism, is that we have to find a way of ‘Staying with the Trouble’ ie the trouble we have made for ourselves. We need, like Ren shows us, to have a word with ourselves.
And on hearing Ren I remembered a thing I did as a performance that showed the act of co-evolution, two species evolving independently to arrive at the same place. I wrote this
Two Figures:
At 64 and over time
Grit in wind and water
Erosion and corrosion
Remove matter
To show what matters
Two figures emerge
In black and gold
Millstone grit
Unsure what they are at first
Until a diptych
Two parts
Connected
Remain
The First Part
As the end of life
shines brighter than birth
A hard core
Of misanthropy
Takes hold
And says
‘I am
Looking forward
To leaving this all behind
All that we have done to this world
It’s your’s
You can keep it
Too many kinds of phones
Too many kinds of coffees
Too many kinds of milk
Too many choices
Enough
We are consumed
Evolution did not halt
With the arrival
Of Homo Sapiens
Finish me before the extinction event
It is unfair I know
But children,
It is your’s
You can have it.
I don’t care any more
The Second Part
But
Sensation
I will miss
The sound
Of children coming out of school
Or walking
At the end of summer
And hearing
Joni Mitchell singing..
Blue
Drifting out a car stereo
In a jam
Blue
The colour of the sky
My daughters hand
My wife arms
Wind at my back on the Pennines
Waking up outdoors
Sleeping under canvas
The smell of coffee
The scent of cut flowers
I will miss my body
I will miss you
I will miss the world
I will miss this
Moving Space 