Teufelsberg is a photographic approach to the contemporary “archaeological remains” that have sprouted to the surface of the Teufelsberg mountain in Berlin. Teufelsberg is a 120 metre high artificial hill created between 1950 and 1972 by the Berlin population itself.
Nowadays, these remains that are appearing on the surface, show in their appearance their own condition of time and place and manifest themselves as strangers in the forest that grows in it. They are pieces that do not lie about their volume or about their production and that are erected and open reality by differentiating themselves from the earth, like a stone that has been raised vertically in the ground (the first sculpture).
What interests us in this situation is the evidence that it is not the utility or the story of the mountain, its belonging to the whole, that gives meaning to the stone and that, therefore, it does not represent what it alludes to either, standing in front of us, is not that narrative of what names what rebukes us. But, everything that ignores us. Everything that is independent of our gaze, of the story and of the operation that we attribute to it. (Although it is very good to know that it is 26 million m3 of Berlin). The mountain is the result of the accumulation of rubble from the city destroyed during World War II and, on the other hand, the need to bury a project: the largest military academy in the world designed by Albert Speer with the “advice” of Hitler.
November 14, 1957, celebration of the ten millionth ㎥ of rubble
Bi Hormetara gallery, Spain, 2023