Heike Klussmann – Surround
Text by Anja Schürmann
»That the paths, once identifiable, have continuity as well, is an obvious functional necessity. People regularly depended upon this quality. The fundamental requirement is that the actual track, or bed of the pavement go through…« (Kevin Lynch)*
The way through the Pempelforter Straße U-Bahn station is in no way
consistent. What am I seeing, one wonders, what can I even see? Black,
white, oblong, perhaps ribbons? They run over and under one another,
invading and bouncing apart.
This, what a space usually tames, what holds it together, is its
universal qualification: space can be measured. Klussmann understands
her room as it is and simultaneously completely differently. She has
accurately measured the space and converted it into a 3D model. And, in
parallel, she destroys it, sees it as a procession, as a way of many
ways, as space that through and through takes on its form of use. Four
white bands that have the same mass as the entrance areas move from each
entrance through the space. The flow over and under, right and left in
the station, bounce off the walls and on the floor like a billiard ball
and branch out further into the station. The base of the enameled tiles
is black and through the five entrances they come, 20 white bands
flooding the station, intersecting, overlapping and continuing into the
U-Bahn tunnel where they meet the rhomboid pattern of Continuum, also
designed by Klussmann. The title of the work, Surround, could be
translated as »the enclosure, the environment,« which the room also
confers on another level. It is a conscious avoidance of representation
through a central perspective of which the binary color is a result.
And, at the same time, leads to the fundamental question of the
perception of space that provokes the tilting effect in Pempelforter
Straße. Image and space alternate with each other, flatness of the black
white is spatial through the overlapping and collision of the bands. As
a guided overwriting of the public spaces, the bands simulate paths
that are infinitely absurd – or gray, if one thinks further spectrally.
In a current project, touch sensitive design materials have been created
and, for example, make the touch of dripping water or the movement, or
lack thereof, from people traceable. The processes shown here are, as
traces, in some sense intentionally arbitrary. Arbitrary in the sense
that just as calculations and simulations are a blurred mental map of
the city – which is largely determined by the ways one travels through
it – is always harder to create through present day excitement. Because
the U-Bahn stations have – according to French anthropologist Marc Augé
– no identity, relations or history more than as a place where you stop.
They are no-places. Klussmann is aware of the precarious situation of
such places and does not even try to transform the U-Bahn station into a
living room: She accepts the procedural nature of space and its transit
function. A space that is not for lingering, rather is conceived of for
traversing, and then she visualizes this transit in black and white.
*
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, MA., MIT Press, 1960, p. 52. Back to top
