Brushed by Hand, Polished by Foot

21.12.2020 / Marius Schwarz

In 2012, the city of Freiburg invested in a fleet of hybrid electronic sweepers, all in the name of modernisation. Soon after their introduction, it turned out that in addition to trash and dirt, these sweepers also sucked up much of the sand from the grout joints of the city’s historical pavement. Consequentially, the department of civil engineering had to re-fill the streets with sand up to five à six times a year, which amounted in enormous annual expenditures. As usual when progress and history clash, a compromise had to be made. In the end, the city cleaners were asked to turn off their brand new sweepers on historic pavements and go back to using the hand broom instead.

Paving has been a part of Freiburg since the 19th century. Stone by stone, its squares, streets and sidewalks were laid out, in structured or wild patterns, partially decorated or lined with ornaments. The pebble for paving used to be harvested during low tide at the river banks of the Rhine near Breisach from where they were carried over to Freiburg ever since. Travelling from the Alps of Switzerland, through Lake Constance and down the Rhine, these pebbles were ground into the characteristic flat ellipses. Due to their differing minerals, they came in a variety of colour shades, which made them a perfect material for complex designs.

Next to streets and squares, the pavers were asked to lay out mosaics, highlighting certain landmarks in the city. Some of them showed coats of arms in front of official buildings or icons and logos in front of businesses, others referred to the date of their construction or were purely ornamental. Allegedly, the first paver to make these signs in stone was Alois Krems (1825-1881), who is said to have picked up the technique during his wandering years in Southern France. The oldest preserved example is the “1899” inscription in Gerbergasse. It is also the only mosaic officially listed and protected as a monument. Since its beginning, paving was officially considered as architecture nor art. Up until today it remains a grey area and its design and execution stays the responsibility of each paver.

When Freiburg was bombed by the Royal Air Force in 1944, the paving tradition came to a sudden halt. Eighty percent of the cities buildings was destroyed, as were 38km of its streets. Fortunately, much of the wreckage got preserved and stored. While other destructed cities decided to rebuild their streets with cheaper concrete or asphalt in the years after the war, Freiburg revived its costly tradition, reusing much of the old material.

Today, street maintenance falls under the jurisdiction of the department of civil engineering and its employees. At their premises – just outside of the town – all sorts of stones are stored, sorted by colour and size, with some still dating back to the war. Since the pebble stocks of the Rhine river banks are almost exhausted, they are especially precious. The department categorizes them in three sizes with their very own stencil unit. The sizes relate to the amount of square meter a paver is expected to lay in a work day. Stones of size three equal about three square meters a day, stones of size one equal one square meter. Based on this unit, the department matter-of-factly calculates the costs of the pavement and the wage of the paver.

While the mosaics used to be paved directly into a bed of sand in the streets, today, they are prepared in the workshop during the winter months. In day-to-day business, the work on mosaics mainly concerns renovations. Every now and then new mosaics are commissioned by business owners, who want to advertise their new stores. Other times, the commission will come from the city, as part of the inauguration ceremony of new twin cities, for example. If there already is a pre-existing design, the pavers develop detailed plans to set them in stone. If there is none, they are free to develop and draw their own designs based on ideas that came up in talking to the clients. With the aid of wooden stencils, the mosaics are assembled inside big steel pans. Layer by layer, the stencil parts are removed and filled with stones. In the end, the mosaics are laid into the street in one piece.

When the work on a mosaic is done, the wooden stencils are put into storage. The new mosaic in the street will be hand-brushed by city cleaners to make sure moss can settle in the joints and harden the sand. Over the years, the shoes of thousands of Freiburg's pedestrians will polish the stones and give them their characteristic matt shine.

Most people will walk on the pavements without giving them much thought. Once in a while, however, someone will briefly stop and note the subtle execution or wonder about the origin of their design. Bit by bit, they could uncover more of their story: the long journey of the pebble; the destruction of the war and the efforts of reconstruction; the unforeseen compromises from maintaining tradition in modern times; the devotion, craftsmanship and the creativity of the anonymous paver.

Difficult Times

21.12.2020 / Aziza Harmel

When Leon Hoesl, artistic director of the Biennale für Freiburg, told me about the new graphic identity for the biennale and mentioned the use of the typeface Difficult Times, we were in lock down, dealing with a worldwide pandemic. The title of the typeface resonated and yet I first wondered, when in difficult times, do we have time to make typefaces? When in difficult times, do we open a new Biennale? The answer to these questions is probably no… or if we do so it means that times are not difficult enough. Nevertheless, if the world was in this never-ending slow-motion apocalypse, we have decided to make the time for all of these things. Don’t we all need to find ways to make the waiting more bearable? Whatever we do today, it will bear witness to our difficult and strange times.

Whether it was the right moment to make Difficult Times or not is not our main issue here. As it turns out the typeface was designed back in 2012 and the name just gained new meaning in the present context. I was intrigued by this typeface for different reasons, beyond its title. There is something almost amusing about the fact that it was based on Times New Roman, which is considered one of the most readable typefaces. The designer has slightly shifted the shapes and effectively disturbed the order of what is supposed to be the perfectly balanced letter shapes.

The predominant use of certain serif typefaces during more than a half millennium in printed matters could be the reason why we affirm that they are the most readable ones, but scientifically we have still not demonstrated that certain shapes are more legible and readable than others. In other words, the idea of the perfect letter is a construction made out of our conditioning to perceive harmony within the western canon.

The unease one could feel while going through a text typed in Difficult Times is related to how habits and aesthetics in the use of typography influence the reading process. It is the cognitive aspect of typography in the reading activity. It is precisely this cognitive aspect that the designer is tempted to tease. I use the verb tease because it is always with subtlety that the designers have distorted things. The cannon is still there, latent. Yet something has shifted and because shape is ideology and rhythm, even if we would go back to Times New Roman, we would never end up in the same place. It is all a question of time.

Excerpts from “A Walk” by Rahima Gambo

05.11.2020 / BfF #1

Introduction by Aziza Harmel

Can we walk as a response to this?
This is one of the first questions that Rahima Gambo asks in her film “A Walk”. Gambo understands walking as a narrative mechanism and collects objects during her strolls that she integrates in her drawings and installations. The artist came to ideate her practice of walking when she was researching the rising incidents of suicide bombings in northeastern Nigeria. Not knowing how to face this horror, she starts to follow a path where she collects information found below the surface of what she can perceive with her own eyes. When the road becomes a site for memory and knowledge, the focus shifts and perceptions merge. The walk recognizes different spatial and temporal knowledge systems and is an attempt to heal, by putting things together like the artist does in her collages and assemblages. Just like in her photographs and video stills, there is something new and disjointed about these collages that differs from what it once was: “Not a woman, not a plant, not a picture, not a drawing, not a body, not a landscape, not a photograph, not a sculpture, not stillness and not movement.”

If information is control,
what is its opposite?

The two lines read like a riddle.
In the deep silences, the deeper contemplations,
in the deep end.
Where sound muffles and sight blurs.
Can we make sense of this?
Can we wander with no destination?
No known outcome or perceived end?
Can we walk as a response to this?

This
‘This is where she detonated her device’, a man said.
I looked down and notice a few bits of torn material,
mixed up with the earth and broken sticks.
And I looked further away towards where the reddish brown land met the sky.

How does one wrap language around the unexplainable, the unknown and the horrific. When we are exposed to the incomprehensible language stutters in fears. The tools of meaning-making of witnessing and documenting become inadequate. In these moments, instead of making sentences perhaps we should meet the incoherent with the incoherent, the negative with the negative.

I have this memory, it is not my own. It is my mother’s. She is eight and walking from her village ‘Wurode’ to school. She is a small child, smaller than the other children. As she walks, she kicks up the sand around her feet. Her feet are cracked. The tiny rocks cut at the soft parts, which at this point are numb from walking for so long so far.

As I walk I think about how I can mend a rupture,
stitch a gash and put the pieces back together of something
fragmented and exploded in the landscape.

A walk
A walk is about this land.
A walk
A walk is about the bodies of those unknown and unidentified
women who merged with the land.
A walk is transition.
A walk is resistance.
A walk
A walk is freedom.

Escape
A scape
Es-cape
Escapes
Escape from the confined limitations of
a certain location or environment.
Escape from suffering wounding and trauma.
Trauma keeps us frozen and unmoving.
Trauma makes us quickly grasp at language
to create a thick layer of ice over the void of unknowing,
someone once said.
To break through the ice means to find two-dimensionality.

I had to move.
I had to walk.
With each step leaning on what at first I thought was nothingness.
But upon closer inspection was a thick and writhing space of information,
not information that I could easily recognize.
But something that was below the surface
of what I could perceive with my eyes.

While walking I learned that one should not approach the wound directly. One should wander, wander around it for a time, double back and walk away from it, go outside for a time, then pivot and go in.

Inside is where true healing lies.
In the interior world, and the interior landscape.
What is healing, but putting back together things. Yes, walk in a straight line. And after a time, go off on a tangent, and then go off on another tangent. Walk until you break apart and shatter the boundaries between inside and outside.

Come apart at the edges a little and scatter into a pile of neatly cut lawn grass. Then slowly start to put the pieces back together. But this time, they will come together where they fit, far from where they used to be.

Disjointed and uncomfortable and incoherent.
Yes, it comes back together.
But not as it once was.
Not a woman, not a plant, not a picture, not a drawing,
not a body, not a landscape, not a photograph,
not a sculpture, not stillness, and not movement.

While walking I learned that one should not approach the wound directly. One should wander, wander around it for a time, double back and walk away from it, go outside for a time, then pivot and go in.

Inside is where true healing lies.
In the interior world, and the interior landscape.
What is healing, but putting back together things. Yes, walk in a straight line. And after a time, go off on a tangent, and then go off on another tangent. Walk until you break apart and shatter the boundaries between inside and outside.

Come apart at the edges a little and scatter into a pile of neatly cut lawn grass. Then slowly start to put the pieces back together. But this time, they will come together where they fit, far from where they used to be.

Disjointed and uncomfortable and incoherent.
Yes, it comes back together.
But not as it once was.
Not a woman, not a plant, not a picture, not a drawing,
not a body, not a landscape, not a photograph,
not a sculpture, not stillness, and not movement.

Ortsbegehung

24.09.2020 / BfF #1

On-site tour and first public announcement of Biennale für Freiburg #1.

During the on-site tour at Stadtgarten the newly conceived Biennale für Freiburg, as well as the concept of its inaugural edition were presented for the first time – a light kick-off for BfF #1, which will take place next year in two phases: the first between May and July 2021 with the Studio Program, and a second one in September 2021 with a public exhibition at various locations throughout Freiburg, accompanied by a rich program of events. We are grateful to everyone who came to Stadtgarten on the 24th of September despite the difficult weather conditions on that day!

Heinrich Dietz, director of the Kunstverein Freiburg and chairman of the association Perspektiven für Kunst in Freiburg e.V., which is responsible for the BfF. Dietz recapitulates how the conception of a new biennial came about through an initiative by Freiburg artists and cultural practitioners. This initiative started as a reaction to the closure of the Freiburg satellite campus of the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe in 2017, which had been an important institution for art education in Freiburg since the 1950’s. The initiative developed into a program that contained several demands for the improvement of the contemporary art scene in Freiburg. These demands were included in the municipal’s budget with the support of the first mayor of Freiburg Ulrich von Kirchbach. It was agreed upon that Freiburg was in dire need for new impulses in the contemporary scene, after the closure of the public art school and that this could be generated through the format of a temporary exhibition, taking place also in public space. This measure was envisioned as a compensation, but – importantly – not a substitute for the academy. The initiative led to the formation of a smaller working group, which today for acts as the board of the association that is organizing BfF, consisting of Heidi Brunnschweiler, Heinrich Dietz, Julia Galandi-Pascual and Ben Hübsch. The next step after the formation of the board, was the appointment of Leon Hösl as Artistic Director to conceive the curatorial concept of the first edition and implement the vision of the initiative put forward by Freiburg’s cultural scene.

Heinrich Dietz: “When I look at the coherent concept for the first edition of the Biennale für Freiburg, I am convinced that it will set off impulses with an effect both on the city and beyond. One thing is certain: the first edition of the Biennale will be a new and important step – but hopefully not the only one – towards enriching the cultural life of the city through contemporary art in a sustainable way”.

For Leon Hösl, Artistic Director, the name of the new format, Biennale für Freiburg, already hints at its programmatic orientation:
“The designation as a ‘Biennial’ stands for a continuity that, unlike other short-term projects, enables an ongoing engagement with art in the city of Freiburg. It is not a matter of seeking comparison with the largest biennials in the world, but of creating a framework for artists to react to Freiburg over and over again, but also differently every time. The preposition ‘Für’ (‘for’) in Biennale für Freiburg implies that the locality of Freiburg should determine the thematic orientation of each edition. ‘Für Freiburg’ is thus also to be understood as an opportunity to think about and react to the local context from an external perspective; to identify needs and respond to them, but also to point out problems and address them directly. This relationship between the Biennale für Freiburg and the city of Freiburg is actually already summed up in the acronym ‘BfF’ - BFF, BEST FRIENDS FOREVER.”

Christoph Chwatal and Fritz Laszlo Weber – part of the curatorial advisory board, which has been extensively involved in the conception and programming of the BfF – present the working methods of this group. The three other members, Aziza Harmel, Fanny Hauser and Magdalena Stöger, could not be present due to the current travel restrictions concerning COVID-19.

A statementput forward by the curatorial advisory board contains the following excerpt: “In its form and structure, the advisory board contributes to bringing together differently situated perspectives on the development of a Biennale für Freiburg. The word ‘for’ is a preposition, a relational word. It stands before the actual expression—just as we stand before the actual event, the Biennale für Freiburg 2021. Prepositions can carry local, temporal or causal meanings or serve to mark grammatical relations. As a Curatorial Advisory Board, we see our task in assisting the Biennial by shaping the relationship between the ‘Biennial’, ‘for’ and ‘Freiburg’. Relationships are often unsteady in nature. They change. They update, renew and change. At the same time, a relationship is always based on what has been already. It builds upon its past. We understand the process of accompanying and our conversations as tools to build and form new relationships and relations. From previously informal moments of exchange, new working structures are now developing, which we would like to reveal and reflect upon as we guide the Biennial’s focus along a process-based and site-specific way of working.“

The concept for BfF #1, conceived as a reaction to the aforementioned closure of the Freiburg branch of the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts, takes the studio as its starting point. The aim will be to transfer processes and actions that usually take place in an artist studio to other contexts and situations. Now that the studios of the Academy of Fine Arts no longer exist, new places must be identified where art can be produced, discussed and taught. Such places can also be found in public space, and one method of accessing them is walking. Taking the work of Lucius Burckhardt as an initial loose jumping off point, walking can serve as a method of translating individual impressions into a cinematic sequence through which moving cityscapes are created that can lead to a deeper understanding of the surroundings. Or, as artist and trained journalist Rahima Gambo, describes her practice: walking as a search for other forms of reporting that do not attempt to translate the subjective experience of events into facts. Instead, walking becomes a search for another form of knowledge and how that knowledge is transmitted.

The “Ortsbegehung” took place in the Stadtpark in the northeast of Freiburg's historical center. This site formed the backdrop for a collective walk, exploring the idea of walking as a way of working in and with a public environment. It also encouraged thoughts about ways of presenting and storing collective memories in the public space. In case of the Stadtpark, it is striking how many monuments and statues are positioned in this green area – often dismantled from other places and explicitly placed here, not unlike an exhibition in a museum.

One monument commemorates the fallen soldiers of various Baden regiments in the First and Second World Wars: a gigantic column with a steel helmet on the top – called “hatstand” by the locals – an epitome of heroic masculinity. The real hero of the park is missing: the duck in the pond, which warned of air raids on the city even before the official alarm was released. His beak was damaged and is now being carefully restored. In the middle of the roses a steel in shines in pure white. A sun dial with a female body – the arms hardly recognizable, as if bound by her dress. Fragmented for some years now, she has fallen victim to vandalism at night and has lost her head, which is still missing today. Is she jealous of the drake, who is treated so caringly? Should her head also be restored, and if so how? Another gap in this park, in which so many objects of embodied memories are placed, is the memory of Rosa Luxemburg's speech. Held in 1914, she addressed a strong speech on pacifism to thousands of Freiburg man and women at this place, but there is no material form of remembrance of her – no hat stand or drake made of stone. Just a sticker on the soap dispenser of the public toilet. How can this story nevertheless become a part of this place?

The last stop took the group to what is probably the smallest street of Freiburg. Leading towards the well-known Münsterplatz, the Präsenzgasse is easily overlooked. Here the first posters announcing BfF #1 were distributed on the walls. Sign-up to our newsletter and follow this blog to learn more about the origin of the graphic design of Biennale für Freiburg and our typeface “Difficult Times”, especially conceived by graphic designers Ronja Andersen and Marius Schwarz.

All photographs by Marc Doradzillo.