English to Italian Art/Literary Art, Arts & Crafts, Painting

However: those readers familiar with her work through its high-profile inclusion in the 2008 Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art might object that Susanne Kriemann’s presentation in Mies Van der Rohe’s iconic Neue Nationalgalerie was not so much a “portrait” of transience as it was a document of the unfortunate permanence, persistence even, of a certain architectural “landmark” that we would rather forget about, so much so that we have indeed largely forgotten about it: a 12.650-ton hulking circular mass of concrete tucked away along the shaded borders of Berlin-Tempelhof that is pretty much the only remaining trace of Hitler’s psychotic, deluded vision of the Nazi capital Germania as it would have been laid out by Albert Speer after the victorious conclusion of the Second World War. (There is of course quite a bit of National-Socialist architecture left in Berlin, but very little of it is directly related to the megalomaniacal Germania project.) The structure, however, is not so much a building as it is a sketch (and not even of a building at that), a mere preliminary experiment devised to test the capacity of Berlin’s notoriously sandy soil to absorb the unimaginable pressure of Nazi city planning: it is technically referred to as a “Schwerbelastungskörper” or “heavy load body,” a monument to a kind of folly that is entirely ***beyond praising***. This is something very different from, say, photographing the post-war buildings that now stand on the site of former synagogues (for those have really disappeared), and the mnemonic nature of photography is here mobilized to very different effects: in a way, a photograph of the “heavy load body,” which is the very opposite of a flock of birds (but more like the monstrosities being erected on Alexanderplatz right now), is a record of the persistence of the photographic image itself, both in the analogue sense (that of the endless reproduction of prints from one single negative) and the digital sense (that of the endless proliferation of zeroes and ones and the impossibility to locate a single original within this encrypted swarm of data). Like a photograph, the concrete sarcophagus on the edge of Tempelhof is a trace of the utmost physicality as well, its windowlessness and sheer intransigence a cipher of the essential opacity of the photographic image: there is no peering through it to unveil a singular truth of the picture, its ambivalence forever lodged in the preserve of the eye