Sandsmaking
Corinna Studier (she/her) works at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, research, and art. She co-initiated “spätispäti,” a collective that questions institutional learning structures and neoliberal space production through collective performative action and situated interventions. Between 2019 and 2023, she co-founded the planning office ARGE:. She has collaborated with organizations such as Floating University, Raumlabor Berlin, and Bauhaus Earth. Additionally, she is engaged in the initiative “An.ders Urania” against demolition. In 2024, she will teach at HCU in Hamburg. During the same year, she will develop an artistic research project aimed at depicting the complexity of a post-socialist peatland landscape through spatial and artistic methods, creating space for resonance.
Just now, somebody said movement is life.
Can movement also be oblivion?
Movement, rhythm, reassurance, control.
Keeping busy, keeping productive,
we didn’t lose, we aren’t losers.
“Just a little bit more digging, please.
I’m closing it up, nobody will eeever notice!”
(What a good boy)
“When East and West were not together,”
– how he said it in broken English –
the mine was the materialization
of the holy pray on productivity:
the plan and the planning; the worker, the hero,
the pride, “das Proletariat”:
“Dynamo”, “Energie” forward into the future,
never ever into the past.
(State blesses you. Amen)
The mine was still there when
“East and West came together.”
Much had to be forgotten, obscured, suppressed,
but the huge hole nobody could deny.
The hole was good, it was keeping busy.
Neatly planned, almost designed, shifting sand,
shifting it again, a sand making sense without thinking.
Coal up in the air – I don’t care.
The movement, the machine, the man,
the flow of energy – was worth of something
(especially for sombody else)
still a tiny piece of the disrupted prayer:
into the future, but never ever into the past.