Favorites of the week: The Mermaids of Mallorca – Culture

Illustrated book: “La Isla” by Kate Bellm

They have just dived into the water, with air bubbles swirling behind them. The thought of mermaids inevitably comes up when you see the six naked divers. Photographer Kate Bellm has an enormous talent for capturing moments like this. Born in London and raised in Berlin, she studied in Paris and has now found her home on the underrated side of Mallorca. The Serra de Tramuntana region, with its rough mountain slopes, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Bellm shows the island in a way that has never been seen before: gritty, slightly psychedelic and wildly romantic. If you want to find the places from her photo book “La Isla”, you should pay a visit to the historic Finca Corazón: Kate Bellm gives the guests of her newly opened hotel some insider tips. Clara Westhoff

Installation: “My Body is not on Iceland”

The former Church of Our Lady in Duisburg has served as an exhibition space for ten years. The modernist basilica, with its plexiglass windows and ciborium from the Vatican pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, is a worthy goal in its own right. But filling such a large space is also a challenge. As part of the Ruhrtriennale and in cooperation with the “Neue Künste Ruhr” initiative, the Czech artist Eva Koťátková is currently performing her large-scale installation “My Body is not on Iceland”. Associative quotes and smaller works are grouped around a huge, torso-like metal cage, allowing visitors to grapple with the role of the body as an identity-forming, but often alienating element of existence. A highly successful combination of art location and work of art. Alexander Menden

Painting: Carl Blech exhibition in Branitz

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Branitz, the landscape park of Prince Pückler near Cottbus, is one of the Prussian wonders with which the rough, barren country dreamed of itself. It is beautiful there at any time of the year, but especially at the moment because of an exhibition in the Pücklersches Schloss. It applies to the bold and wild landscape painter Carl Blechen (1798 – 1840), who was born in Cottbus. And a family of collectors who had already acquired his works during Blechen’s lifetime. In 2017, their last descendants donated four valuable paintings to the Cottbus painting collection, which focuses on sheet metal. This Frick family, whose most important representative built up a modern graphics business in Berlin around 1800, in which both precise romantic vedutas and banknotes that were as forgery-proof as possible were printed using innovative technology, is hardly less interesting than the Blechen genius.

At Branitz Castle, the good idea came up of presenting the four donated paintings as part of a new hanging of the holdings, with many panoramic views of contemporary landscape painting (until October 30th). At the same time, separate showcases provide information about the Fricks and their technically advanced printing business, which at the same time spreads romantic aesthetics. The romantic and the modern are mutually dependent, inevitably. The Frick’sche company developed an aquatint technique with special grains that could reproduce light effects and material textures precisely and atmospherically, as can be seen in the medieval Marienburg of the Teutonic Order. A lot could be earned with this and with the banknotes, and this money flowed into a collecting activity, the results of which are only now reaching the public.

Blechen, for example, has preserved a sketchy, sweeping version of a view of Assisi, which Munich residents know from their Neue Pinakothek in a grandiosely enhanced version. It is now being shown in Cottbus on a wonderful tin wall with a dozen other pictures. The Cottbus stock has probably never been presented so beautifully and lovingly as now in the new hanging at Prince Pückler in Branitz. Gustav Seibt

Chanson: “September” by Barbara

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If ever a song captured the feeling that triggers the time when late summer turns to early fall, it’s this. “You can already see the swallows gathering,” sings Barbara, the most soulful of the classic French chansonnières, with her dark timbre, to a melody that you won’t forget. In addition, she skilfully strums an almost cheerful little piano line in a minimalist way, and an accordion also plays. And it goes on: “What a nice time to say goodbye, what a nice evening to enjoy your youth.” The summer, the youth, which literally translates here as “twenties”. It’s about love, of course, and everything sounds like farewell (“I’m standing on the quay”), as at the end of Stéphane Brizé’s film “Mademoiselle Chambon”, to which “Septembre” can be heard. But, what a comfort, what a highlight, the song ends like this: “For you will return to me, mon amour – see you tomorrow.” Kathleen Hildebrand

Performance: Florentina Holzinger’s “Scrap Etude”

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The car is hanging on a crane in front of the Berlin Olympic Stadium like a hanged man in a horror regime: a Peugeot 406 Break, around 23 years old, a conservative family car. What is he accused of? There are people in the audience who report that at their most recent Holzinger performance, in June at the Müggelsee, a whole wreath of people hung from a crane over the water. That was the “Crane Etude”. This will now be the “Scrap Etude”, presented by the Kunstverein Schinkel-Pavillon as part of the long-term festival “Disappearing Berlin”.

That is a brutal title in this place, especially in view of the situation of Hertha BSC. Old West Berliners can already be heard complaining that Hertha will disappear, just as the Charlottenburg ice hockey heroes BSC Preussen disappeared together with the Deutschlandhalle, only the Eastern clubs should remain. But in front of the Olympic Stadium, which will probably not disappear anytime soon, very few give the impression that they have any interest in such things. Where normally Hertha or Helene Fischer fans are waiting to be admitted, this Wednesday it looks more like in front of a club in Kreuzberg that is open to discussion or in the queue in front of the Volksbühne, where Florentina Holzinger’s permanently sold-out “Ophelia Got Talent” is the play of the year has become. To have transported this audience to this place is such a disturbing shift in context that one would like to present the celebrated Viennese choreographer with an art prize for that alone.

“Scrap Etude” is actually short, but powerful. Two drummers, a conductor, two performers pulling and hammering metal, all undressed as always, in the Arab Drift surrounded by a BMW 3 Series, with Holzinger himself playing the violin in the rear-view mirror. Then the Peugeot crashes into another car: sea of ​​flames, burning people march on the crowd and are extinguished. And the entire Berlin art scene is standing there with beeping ears and eyes and already wants to be part of the next Holzinger etude somewhere where they would otherwise never go. Peter Richter