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Am Ryck ~ exhibition by Alison Darby and Juliane Tübke

                 ~ text by Ulrike Gerhardt

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Juliane Tübke: ERL (2024) - 2024 - Site specific installation, Porcelain clay, spray paint, steel grids, dimensions variable (Detail view

Peatland

Ryck meadows, Steinbecker Vorstadtpolder

bunch of boggy peaty grassy sloppy sedgy tongues keep the well-preserved information paradoxically distorted through different readings over time. When trying to be deciphered, these tongues bubble language that eventually decays into communication unintelligible to human ears, bodies and embodiment. Can we read, taste, write and be with a bog? Maybe mirroring as sph sph sph agnum floating between lakes, these tongues come and go with migratory x-ozauria and are speculated upon by beings of the forensic o  

Artists

Alison Darby, Juliane Tübke

Author

Ulrike Gerhardt

Format

Exhibition at the Botanical Garden Greifswald, June 15 - September 5, 2024

Collaborators

Koenraad Ecker

Time:

Summer 2024

In their duo exhibition Am Ryck (engl. At the Ryck) in Greifswald’s botanical garden, the artists Juliane Tübke and Alison Darby explore the history and future of the drained peatland landscapes around the Ryck meadows and the Steinbecker Vorstadt polder in Greifswald. The exhibition focuses on the development of the Ryck meadows as captured in the drawing Am Ryck in Greifswald mit Blick auf die Mühlen vor der Steinbecker Schanze (1801) (engl. At the Ryck in Greifswald with a view of the mills in front of the Steinbecker Schanze) by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich. In 1801, he drew the Ryck meadows in washed ink from the banks of the Ryck. The drawing was created when the area was first used as pastureland: At that time, the process of peatland drainage – which would continue for centuries – had already been started with the help of windmills and small ditches.[1] In the context of their exhibition, the artists examine how the complex history of the drainage of the Ryck meadows has since then affected the peatland ecosystem up to the present day.

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Left: Alison Darby: CHIP (2024) - Chipboard from reeds, reed canary grass and sedge, wood, steel, strawberry pomace, acrylic paint 

Right: Am Ryck, exhibition view at the Botanical Garden Greifswald, 2024

The artist Juliane Tübke is interested in human-environment-relationships, specifically from symbiocene perspectives.[2] In her multimedia installation Hilda (2024), she sheds light on the vegetal life of the drained Ryck meadows; the title “Hilda” refers to the earliest documented name of today’s Ryck river. Over the course of a year, she conducted site-specific research and talked to residents, farmers and scientific experts as well as landscape ecologists and biologists from the Greifswald Mire Centre. Tübke is particularly interested in the role of plants for peatlands, especially reeds and black alder. She recognizes plants as powerful agents that shape ecosystems and co-create habitats. For the three-piece video installation Unter den Wiesen (2024) (engl. Under the meadows), she documented reed plants that still grow on the drained peatland: By marking them with phosphorescent pigment she transforms them into will-o’-the-wisp-y[3] light sources during the night.

 

Tübke’s special perspective on plants is also reflected in her three-part video installation Unter den Wiesen (2024) (engl. Under the meadows), in which she combines scientific and artistic imaging techniques: While in biology, fluorescent paint is used to stain cells, Juliane Tübke makes an emblematic mark by applying a pigment to the outside of the plant, revealing its surface and texture. For this installation, she chose the reed plant, a plant that consists of a richly branched underground rhizome and forms the typical stalks above ground. Accordingly, the reed plants growing on the drained peatland are connected to each other by a network that is initially ‘invisible’ to the human eye.

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Juliane Tübke: ERL (2024) - 2024 - Site specific installation, Porcelain clay, spray paint, steel grids, dimensions variable

The video work CUTS (2024) is a key work in the exhibition: A drone flight across the present-day Steinbecker Vorstadt polder. The images show a tracking shot across a snow-covered landscape. First across the Ryck river, which emerges from the mist with a dark glow that is reminiscent of its origins as wet peatland. From the Ryck, the view extends over the dyke, crosses the alder forest and finally shows the cuts in the landscape formed by the construction of drainage ditches. This landscape relief demonstrates the man-made scars of a damaged ecosystem whose future remains uncertain for various reasons.

 

Because of its occurrence at “wet” locations such as streams, swamps and peatland, the alder tree holds a fixed position in myths and legends. For her installation made from porcelain clay and called ERL (2024), Juliane Tübke took impressions of alder wood which turns red when cut. This work focuses on the question of how the returning water resulting from rehydration would affect the landscape and the alder forest on the Steinbecker Vorstadt polder. At first, the alders would drown due to fluctuating water levels, only to sprout again afterwards. In their flesh-like colour and dynamic form, the sculptures speculate on the shape of the “new nature”[4] after a possible rehydration, in which the pieces of wood and bark promise a future past their end.

 

Tübke’s artistic examination of the hydrological transformations of the Ryck meadows culminates in the poetic audio piece Hilda (2024) made in collaboration with the sound artist and musician Koenraad Ecker and tracing the efficacy of the water, its aggregation states and landscape formations – featuring field recordings from the site, among other things. Composed and mixed in collaboration with Koenraad Ecker, the audio piece’s point of departure and method is a series of interviews conducted with numerous experts and scientists from the Greifswald region. It resounds throughout the greenhouse, activating the installations both historically and haptically, as it acoustically reflects the materiality of the changing water. The underlying, self-written poem subsumes and reconstructs the history of the peatlands’ development and transformation, from the Mesozoic era to the present day – at times adopting a more-than-human perspective.

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Juliane Tübke: Cuts (2024) Video, Loop

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Alison Darby: CHIP (2024) - Chipboard from reeds, reed canary grass and sedge, wood, steel, strawberry pomace, acrylic paint 

Alison Darby’s work focuses on surfaces, urban archaeologies and territories that bear traces of human activities. Her sculptural installation Chip (2024) investigates the human influence on the Ryck meadows – with an emphasis on agricultural practices, the compartmentalisation of the land and new forms of cultivating rehydrated peatlands. As part of her research, she examined three phases in the history of the Ryck meadows, firstly the Boltenhäger pond employed from the 12 th century for fishing purposes, secondly the complex land melioration[5] to create farmland during GDR times at the end of the 1960s, and thirdly the future paludiculture, i.e. the wet cultivation of peat soils. On two long tables, Darby presents sculptural chipboard reliefs made from the fibres of paludiculture plants such as reeds, reed canary grass and sedge.

Chipboard is considered a poor material; it consists of pressed chips of different origins and times mixed with a binding agent. Darby uses this accessible and quotidian material to refer both to the history of transformation and to the possible rewetted future of the Ryck meadows. The paludicultural chipboard panels were embossed with reliefs whose motifs are closely linked to the products grown on the Ryck meadows. They consist of painted fishing nets, recalling the period before the drainage, and strawberry reliefs, reminiscent of the melioration and subsequent strawberry fields in the Steinbecker Vorstadt polder during GDR times. The upper layer of some of her embossed picture carriers contains elements of strawberry pomace[6], which exude a fruity aroma. 

The third motif features free-standing and stacked standard transport crates such as those used for transporting fruit and vegetables. By means of her reduced depictions, Darby succeeds in making reference to Geometric Abstraction in Abstract Painting and Sculpture and its defining formal principles of reduction, repetition and seriality. On closer inspection, the strawberry ornaments increasingly dissolve into abstraction and the side walls of the standard boxes wrinkle lavishly - in other words, the selected formal principles are both playfully established and dissolved again. Similar to retail displays, the panels are displayed side by side and stacked on top of each other, sometimes even featuring handles and recesses typical of transport containers. On a formal, material, and spatial-physical level, the artist retells the entangled agricultural and industrial history.

 

In their exhibition Am Ryck, Juliane Tübke and Alison Darby’s installations revisit the site-specific architecture of the winter greenhouse in the Botanical Garden: While Darby mirrors the greenhouse’s gallery, Juliane Tübke arranges her work formations like floating islands on the floor. Together, their artistic explorations create a multi-layered and speculative panorama of the Ryck meadows, illuminating the man-made changes in nature and the crisis-ridden relationship to it from the Romantic period, through the present and into the uncertain future.

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Alison Darby: CHIP (2024) - Chipboard from reeds, reed canary grass and sedge, wood, steel, strawberry pomace, acrylic paint 

[1] Later the soil was profoundly drained as part of land development processes of the 1960s and 1970s. The pumping station Steinbecker Vorstadt, a relic from GDR times that was built in 1968 - at the same time as the dyke - still bears witness to this today.

[2] The environmental scientist Glenn Albrecht proposes the concept of the Symbiocene to succeed the Anthropocene. It represents a new era in which humanity lives symbiotically with the environment.

[3] Also known as ghost lights, friar’s lanterns, “ignis fatuus” or “jack-o’-lanterns” in peatland literature, mythology and folklore.

[4] See Kreyling, J., Tanneberger, F., Jansen, F. et al., “Rewetting does not return drained fen peatlands to their old selves”, Nat Commun 12, 5693 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25619-y

[5] Complex melioration: This refers to large-scale drainage projects in the GDR era that were linked to the intensification of land use. Large wetlands and moors such as the Friedländer Große Wiese in Western Pomerania or the Altmärkische Wische were affected. See for example: Neubrandenburg University of Applied Sciences, Institute for Environmental History and Regional Development, „Phase 1970-1982: Socialist Intensification in Agriculture and Forestry“, URL: https://www.hs-nb.de/iugr/naturschutz-hat-geschichte/1970-bis-1982/intensivierung/ [last accessed: 01.07.2024]

[6] Pomace is the predominantly solid residue of fruit, vegetables or other plant components that remains after juicing.

Alison Darby

is a British-Luxembourgian artist who was born in Belgium and currently lives and works in Berlin. She completed her studies at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2018 in the class of Prof. Manfred Pernice. Starting from forms and materials, she asks what patterns and mechanisms are inscribed in surfaces. Her works have been shown internationally (e.g. Structura Gallery, Sofia, 2023) as well as in Germany (e.g. Roam, Berlin, 2023). She has participated in various stone sculptor symposia (e.g. Krastal, Austria, 2023). https://alisondarby.com/

 

Juliane Tübke

lives and works in Berlin. The central theme of her artistic practice is the reciprocal relationship between humans and their environment in history and the present. She has been repeatedly invited to international residencies for her mostly site-specific projects. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including at Heit Berlin (2023), Galerie Robert Morat (2021), Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (2020), Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin (2019) and Pepper House/Kochi Biennale Foundation in India (2019). https://julianetuebke.de/

 

Koenraad Ecker

field recording, sound composition and sound mixing Field recordings made in Greifswald (DE), Jökulsárlón (IC), Eichwerder Moor (DE) and the North Sea (BE). www.koenraadecker.com

Ulrike Gerhardt 

visual culture studies scholar, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg; associated member of the Sensing Peat project of the Michael Succow Foundation.

 

Credits:

 

Supported by: University and Hanseatic City of Greifswald; The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media; University of Greifswald – Botanical Garden

Cooperation partners: Sensing Peat – Art & Research Platform at Michael Succow Foundation, partner in the Greifswald Mire Centre; Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Engineering and Bio-economy e.V., Potsdam; Earth Observation and Geoinformation Science Lab; Institute for Geography and Geology, University of Greifswald Planterial GmbH, Kiel.

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