The first photographs in this volume – all of which were taken in 2017 – give the impression that only a few more manipulations are required. A few final installations and superstructures, final installations, the attachment of signs and directional signs, then operations can start at Berlin’s new Willy Brandt Airport.
It turned out differently, to the great indignation of one and even greater amusement of the other. Soon you will see photographs in the volume “BER” by Matthias Hoch, at which you are puzzled as the viewer: Do you really recognize the state of the almost finished product on them? Or rather the dismantling and conversion? Walls and floors that have been broken up again, ceilings that have been opened again. To rummage again in their bowels, the cables and pipes.
Body scanner is waiting for body. Will they ever come?
(Photo: Matthias Hoch)
The third motive besides progress and regression is standstill. In Matthias Hoch’s photographs you see a lot of wrapped things that you don’t even suspect what it might be. And it often doesn’t look like the packaging is about to be removed because the things underneath are about to be used. It’s as if the things underneath should be protected because nobody needs them yet. Not even in the next week, not in the next month, not even in the next year.
In two of the photos, Hoch took photos of empty car parking spaces on the airport grounds, one in 2017, one in 2019. On the earlier photo, a lot of grass and other plants have already squeezed through the cracks in the pavement. On the later, the plants already form a kind of green area, the pavement underneath and the markings for the individual parking spaces can no longer be seen in some cases.
Who knows what is waiting for the former passengers under this packaging? Smoking cabins? Baggage scanner? Much remains in approximate terms in Hoch’s photographs.
(Photo: Matthias Hoch)
Kathrin Röggla has written a clever, playful essay on the photographs, a literary text with many shifts in words and meaning, which incessantly creates associations and leads to exactly where Matthias Hoch’s deserted photographs find their way: to a place that actually is not there at all.
You can see rooms to which no function is assigned. Finished train stations where no timetables are posted. A construction site that is not being built on. An airport that, according to Röggla, will be used up and where all warranty obligations will have expired long before it goes into operation. It is precisely this strange situation that Matthias Hoch shows in his photographs: a place where a lot is not yet needed – and at the same time no longer. And still be there for years. Without ever being used.
Matthias Hoch: BER. 2017-2020. With texts by Kathrin Röggla and Thomas Weski. Spector Books, Leipzig 2021. 120 pages, 34 euros.