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The
Beginning – Berlin, Summer 1995
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Berlin
changed its face in the summer of 1995. Wherever one looked
there where new construction sites and cranes. The new center
of the once-separated city was to be rebuilt, bigger and more
beautiful than ever. Construction workers came from all sorts
of countries. These workers had their own city built out of
containers on Potsdamer Platz, right at the biggest construction
site in Berlin. With this picture in mind I began my discovery
of the container as the universal means of transport of our
time. |
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| The
Container Phenomenon |
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Containers
move the flow of goods between cities, countries and continents.
Whether by rail, truck, ship or airplane, the metal boxes
with the same dimensions (2,60 m x 2,50 m x 7,30 m, thickness
2,5 mm inches) are used all over the world. Containers transport
modern equipment, humanitarian aid, illegal immigrants, bananas,
furniture and garbage - everything we own, we want to have
and also what we want to get rid of. Like no other means of
transport, the container has become the symbol of our globalized
world. In the USA alone, where the container was discovered
in 1956, 80% of all import goods are now transported by container. |
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| My
Container Works |
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| In
1998 I began to travel through Germany and Europe with a container.
It was marked EXIST ART on the outside and that is exactly
what you could find inside: On a regular basis this ordinary
moving container with the letters EXISTART on it got transformed
into an art gallery in which artists from various disciplines
showed their work (www.existart.de) |
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| Three
years later, in the summer of the 2002, I began to dismantle
the container and turn it into a piece of art. At that time
I moved onto the grounds of the Container Terminal Service
in Cologne.. Where the terminal workers normally work to repair
damaged containers, I started taking apart my container with
a welding torch and a metal grinder. I cut a piece of the
side wall out and worked the new labile metal into a moving
wave-like form. The container was freed of its skin, only
its skeleton remained. |
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Only then I noticed
the corner joints of solid metal with their strange holes. The
forklift uses these holes when it moves the colossal load. Suddenly
it became clear to me that it is exactly these joints that make
it possible to send a container around the world and place it
exactly within a desired inch of where it should be at each
place it goes to. I cut one of the corner joints out and made
it into a 60 cm high pyramid of metal.In August 2003 this pyramid,
along with three of the deformed container pieces, was shown
in an empty white room at my exhibition in Cologne (www.rachelhaferkamp.de).
Thus, the container, symbol of the globalized world of goods,
was elevated to an icon. |
| In
the fall of 2003 I started to concentrate more on the contents
of containers. During a residency in Utica, NY, three works
of art, which have not yet been shown, were created. They
are three wall reliefs (4.5 feet x 4.5 feet) into whose empty
spaces I worked raw materials such as water, oil and wood.
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Furthermore,
in Utica I organized a “Container Breakfast” between
artists in Berlin, Philadelphia and Utica. In both places
stood Containers in which artists had breakfast at the same
time together and communicated with the help of cameras, microphones,
beamers and an internet connection. |
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