choice for Hoyerswerda changed the artists’ agenda as they suddenly confronted buildings arguably of – and in – a very different context from what they initially expected. Based at the outskirts, these blocks overlooked the fields towards an adjacent Sorbic village, only disturbed by a forest of young pine trees, which must have been planted here around the time of WK 10’s erection in the late 1980s. The two blocks – one housing the artists, the other supplying individual studios – were surrounded by either other abandoned apartment houses or the uncanny absences of those blocks that had already been torn down. The parking lot in the courtyard in front of the two blocks was empty and slightly overgrown with weeds; only Frau Meyer’s little silver car parked there regularly during the time of the project. Frau Meyer still lived in the third, neighbouring block (third entrance, fifth floor on the right). Of all the inhabitants of this courtyard, she was the last to move out with her young son, being relocated to a refurbished flat in WK IV a few days after the end of the two-week art project. The artists had suddenly parked their small, used student cars next to hers (not that there was a shortage of parking space) and the courtyard was revived one last time. But how were they to account for Hoyerswerda’s fate in general or Frau Meyer’s life and her current experiences in particular in the language of art?
When walking through the city, these artists saw more of the same, since they first had to cross the three districts most affected by deconstruction and decline before reaching the huge, shiny shopping centre in the New City’s central district or the Old City’s picturesque centre with castle, church and market square. In a city currently torn apart by demolition dredgers, they were as much in need of context in order to make their practices and interventions meaningful as were my informants in their everyday work and life. However, I think Bjarke had a very important point to make: both as a former socialist model city and as Germany’s fastest-shrinking city, Hoyerswerda did not fit the common paradigms easily – the changes were too dramatic and a superficial postmodern critique might not capture that.
WK 10 incorporates these changes. It can probably be described as the epicentre of Hoyerswerda’s shrinkage and deconstruction. Although it was only completed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was, according to plans in 2008, the first district to be completely dismantled by 2013 or, as German bureaucratic jargon has it, ‘area-wide back-built’ (flächendeckend zurückgebaut). During the ‘ArtBlock’ project most of the flats in WK 10 were already empty, because Hoyerswerda’s extreme loss in population specifically affected Neustadt’s outskirts, which housed the youngest and hence most mobile inhabitants. The buildings’ abandonment makes this loss blatantly visible. Bjarke’s initial idea, he confessed, stemmed from this apparent tragedy, capitalizing on the blocks’ totally unexpected life history: finished in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were torn down less than twenty years after their erection. But the buildings did not embody the local context alone.
The artistic production of meaning was strongly influenced by the many reminders of the previous lives these blocks had housed – random household items, old posters, leftover furniture, wooden slides and personal memorabilia.1 In addition, many former and remaining inhabitants of WK 10 – as well as a wider Hoyerswerdian public – revisited this marginal part of Hoyerswerda during the time of the project and shared their memories with the new, though temporary residents. References to Hoyerswerda’s contemporary problems and the former inhabitants who embody them (again, many literally revisiting their old homes) thus abounded in the pieces of art: Christián from Chile painted Hoyerswerda’s official ‘Three Oaks’ crest with massively pruned branches; a German artist wrote excerpts from the GDR constitution’s sections on housing – then a constitutional right – over the walls of her studio to highlight the political and legal changes of the present; two other artists spanned a thread out of their fifth-floor workshop all the way across the courtyard to the adjoining forest, referencing the common local narrative that Neustadt is given back to – or reclaimed by – nature; in another exterior project and with the help of local firemen, an artist attached giant reproductions of photographs of trophies and socialist medals (all found in local homes he had visited) to adjacent blocks in order to, as he claimed, ‘honour their achievements’; an American art student built little miniature blocks out of sand (the main postmining residue) and her German friend used finely cut pieces of the blocks’ concrete walls to assemble a kit for building one’s own miniature castles – a project entitled ‘Make Your Self at Home’ – for those who were forced to leave. By relating meaningfully to the material and social spaces in which they intervened, the artists tried to ensure a dialogue with their local audience, particularly on the work-in-progress open days and the final weekend’s exhibition.
Meanwhile, the last inhabitants were moving out of next-door staircases, underlining that Bjarke had it right from the beginning: there is, after all, only one narrative that contains the many stories the Hoyerswerdians and the artists were telling one another, with only one directionality towards the future – that of decline and demolition. But how does the new surprise – the ‘ArtBlock’ building itself – fit into this narrative? And what other narratives could handle the heterogeneous complexity of the city’s present changes and the multiplicity of stories and perspectives produced in response?
When the Hoyerswerdians came to visit the ‘ArtBlock’ building, their reactions were shaped by their own experiences. People talked about how desirable these flats once were, how they already back then had come to take pictures of their allocated flat’s construction and how, with the changing times, they were now taking pictures of their demolition. But despite the apartments’ dilapidated state and the concrete’s much-discussed poor quality, most visitors remarked on the fact that they were ‘still OK’ (noch in Ordnung) and what a shame it was to tear them down. The context of art, which the artists had drawn them into, made them think about their city’s fate, its past, present and future. Just by coming to this site of demolition, it seemed, they halted the accepted changes for a moment and were invited to reflect on them.
This unexpected encounter thus provided different means for the production or reactivation of knowledge about their city. But, after all, there were no new narratives emerging – no ideas for alternative futures that could allow for the blocks’ survival (although one person suggested that the studios should remain opened indefinitely as a museum). Nonetheless, the Hoyerswerdians were impressed by the artists’ intervention: that the blocks could so unconventionally be used yet again seemed, if only for a moment, to challenge the idea of the one narrative of decline, even without factually overcoming it. Bjarke’s assertion might be contradicted by the unexpected premortem blossoming of those houses – and only the narrative of its final deconstruction held true. Still, I claim, even these blocks’ decline can be narrated, contextualized and directed towards the future in many different ways. Even in Hoyerswerda’s all too bleak present, one can find a whole variety of different contexts and narratives, a few of which I present in the next sections.
The differences between local forms of contextual reasoning partially resemble local political and spatial divisions: conservative Old City inhabitants and winners of the postsocialist changes contextualize their presents differently from left-wing Neustadt inhabitants, who have suffered from unemployment after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. The following examples help to circumscribe the local economy of knowledge and some of its surprisingly far-reaching metaphysics. In them, specific local tropes such as ‘healthy shrinking’ (Gesundschrumpfen), ‘economic expulsion’ (Wirtschaftsvertreibung) and ‘the chances of shrinkage’ (Schrumpfungschancen) are used as epistemic tools and discursive armoury. Their analysis explicates differences in spatiotemporal reasoning. I focus on their explanatory and political value in their respective local sociopolitical contexts (see Strathern 1995b: 132) in order to assess whether Bjarke’s claim was right.
The Local Construction of Context
The contexts constructed for and in Hoyerswerda’s present situation are manifold; they involve both meaningful spatial and temporal relations. For example,
