In August 2020, Sassnitz, the small Baltic Sea port town on the island of Rügen, made international headlines. In a letter, three US senators threatened to impose US sanctions on the city’s port. They wanted to prevent the completion of the Russian-German Gazprom pipeline Nord Stream 2, which has been under construction since 2018. “We have to prove to the world that we won’t let ourselves be intimidated,” said the mayor of Sassnitz at the time. The excitement died down. The billion-dollar German-Russian pipeline has been completed. But it was not connected to the network due to the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Nord Stream 2, the political investment ruin, is now the symbol for the many serious mistakes in German foreign, security and economic policy. It also stands for the shattered hopes that are almost automatically associated with such an industrial project in a structurally weak region.
The black adhesive strips with which the Berlin artist Sven Johne has traced the course of the two pipelines Nord Stream 1 and 2 on the official Baltic Sea chart look like a mourning beam. The collage with the dry title “Nord Stream 1 +2” is from this year and can currently be seen in Johne’s solo exhibition in Cologne. It is probably also something like a farewell picture. If Nord Stream 1 is also shut down in the near future, then there will be “two dead lines, 1,200 kilometers long, 17 billion euros at the bottom of the Baltic Sea,” explains the artist, who was born in Bergen on Rügen in 1976 and lived in the late 1990s studied at the Leipzig Academy for Graphics and Book Art in the early 2000s. A gigantic underwater monument to the era of German-Russian petropolitics, which must now come to an end sooner than planned.
“Navel der Welt” is the name of another new image-text work by Johne. It is a large-format portrait of the city of Sassnitz, where Johne and screenwriter Sebastian Orlac rented for four weeks last fall in order to talk to the townspeople. At the end of the research, Johne produced a digital collage that was almost two and a half meters wide and almost one and a half meters high, with fifteen different views of the city and harbor from a bird’s eye view. It is a modern history painting that gives one the paradoxical feeling of looking directly at the present. The black-and-white images are high-resolution and razor-sharp. Instinctively you delve into the details, such as the order in which the pipeline pipes were stored. But what can you know about the Sassnitz reality when you are hovering over the surface like a missile at a safe distance?
For Johne, the “East” is a kind of “model region” where developments can be seen more clearly
The artist used the computer to insert short texts into the photographed landscape, which read like thought bubbles from restaurateurs, real estate dealers, local politicians, police officers, welfare recipients, Corona walkers, fishermen and fish sandwich sellers. Together they create something like the mental landscape of a small German town. Johne himself calls the text miniatures, which were created during a four-week research on site, “cries for help”. They talk about the effects of climate change, the frustration of the Corona period or concerns about rising prices when money is tight. The harbor landscape looks like a model, the quotes are alienated from fiction.
The Pegida demonstrator addressed Putin directly with his video message: Sven Johne hired an actor for “Dear Vladimir Putin” (film still, 2017).
(Photo: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022/ Sven Johne Klemm’s, Berlin and Nagel Draxler, Cologne)
The artist also wants them to be understood in this way, because for Johne the “East” is a kind of “model region” where general developments and phenomena such as “structural change”, “privatisation”, “political disenchantment”, “isolation” or “shift to the right” sometimes simply occur only show it more clearly than elsewhere. “In the cities in the east, you often see things much more clearly that also affect the west,” says Johne on the phone when asked about the east specifics in his art.
An actor, as a Pegida protester, directs a video message of allegiance to Putin
With the combination of research and fiction, Johne often succeeds in creating speculative stories that act as a contrast to reality. The older video “Dear Vladimir Putin” produced in 2017 is such a work. The artist had an actor play a Pegida protester from Saxony who delivers a video message of allegiance to Vladimir Putin. The artist came up with the idea for the film, which can be found online, when Russian flags appeared during Pegida demonstrations in Dresden. He does not want them to be understood as a specifically German or Saxon phenomenon. After all, there are people who understand Putin in France and Italy, says Johne.
The artist is currently working on a research project entitled “From the perspective of the archive”, which will premiere at the beginning of July as part of the East Festival in the Bitterfeld Kulturpalast. Together with the artist Falk Haberkorn, Johne combed through municipal image archives in Saxony-Anhalt in search of images that were filed there in the early 1990s. What the artists found about the period of de-industrialization and population exodus were primarily “non-images” that condensed into a real “gap in the tradition”. But this form of archive fiction also depicts a kind of reality that provides the material for art.
Sven Johne: Nabel der Welt, until August 20, 2022, Galerie Nagel Draxler Cologne East, Festival in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, August 1-17 July, osten-festival.de