In a shabby, roofless space, with a floor strewn with aerosol cans and the walls covered in graffiti, stands a pristine white plinth that’s more likely to be found in a museum than on a piece of no man’s land in Dresden. There are three white spray cans on it, but made of plaster. Visual artist Ties Ten Bosch gave his work the title Could I be part of your party? Not a superfluous question, because almost immediately one of the local graffiti painters put a tag across the pedestal.
‘It was an ugly tag too, otherwise I might have left it’, Ten Bosch tells a group of residents of Dresden. They are shown around an 18-hectare site in their city where artist collective Ipihan (If Paradise Is Half As Nice) has worked for four weeks. The twelve artists come from Rotterdam, Berlin and Oslo.
The Leipziger Bahnhof was built here in 1839, the station where trains from Dresden to Leipzig departed. In 1856, a Villeroy & Boch porcelain factory followed, including the director’s villa with orangery. About thirty years ago, most buildings were half-heartedly demolished. On rubble heaps of brick, concrete and railway sleepers, a forest has grown with robinia, birch, willow and rowan berries.
Thousand shampoo bottles
The twelve Ipihan members are attracted by brick factories and urban fringes, by the beauty of decay. In previous editions, for example, they ended up in an empty jute spinning mill, a department store annex bakery, a noodle factory and a shampoo factory. All complexes in eastern Germany, left to their own devices since the wave of bankruptcy after the end of the GDR.
During those weeks, they leave their studios and experiment with new artistic concepts and artworks to finally come up with an exhibition that can only be visited for one weekend to the public. ‘The beautiful and at the same time tragic about these places is that there is still so much material and history to be found,’ explains Ties Ten Bosch. “In previous years we found thousands of shampoo bottles and complete personnel files.”
Although almost everything on this site in Dresden has been demolished, the ‘wilderness on ruins’ offers plenty of clues. Willem Besselink, for example, collected 1,500 old bricks to build a round wall of one and a half meters high. Mauerwerk Steinofen has the same circumference as the original Villeroy & Boch oven and is located in the same place.
Unlike previous editions of Ipihan, the artists in Dresden do not have the empire to themselves. The former train station has its regular users with its own unwritten rules. Skaters and boxers share a covered platform in the green wilderness, graffiti painters share the few walls that are still standing – they are completely repainted every few days. A residential camp has been built on concrete sleepers next to another overgrown platform.
‘Is it legal or brave what you are doing?’ one of the Dresden residents asks during the tour. A little bit of both, the answer shows. For the first five years, Ipihan squatted the abandoned factories, since then they have made contact with the developers who bought the buildings with a view to a new use.
In Dresden it is more complex. Ipihan is here at the invitation of Geh8, but this cultural institution does not own the property. For years there have been plans for a Globus DIY store and a Kaufland supermarket with huge parking lots. Whether they will come is the question. In the city on the Elbe there is a discussion about whether a hardware store and a department store are the best repurposing.
Handles on tree trunks
As far as the Ipihan artists are concerned, the Alter Leipziger Bahnhof Dresden will remain a fringe for at least another hundred years. Michiel Jansen even started what could become a permanent landscape artwork in just four weeks. He used the landscape as a sketchbook. Scattered around the site, he placed seven ‘markers’. Thus he laid a grid of branches and twigs on the ground and paved a path over one of the thickly grown rubble mountains.
The young landscape architect Linde Keip, this year’s guest artist at Ipihan, wants curious residents of Dresden to discover the remarkable beauty of this place. During her studies in Wageningen she immersed herself in the use of derelict urban areas. In Dresden she made a walking path over concrete blocks that are scotch and skewed. She placed handles on tree trunks, as if it were a hiking trail in the Alps. Even a single visitor over eighty ventures into the clambering party.
The Ipihan artists have no illusions about whether their artworks have a long life here. The fact is that their approach is starting to take hold. In the summer of 2023, they were invited as curators of the Salangen Biennale, in and around an empty factory complex 1,500 kilometers north of Oslo.
The name Ipihan (If Paradise Is Half As Nice) came to mind for visual artists Daan Botlek and Pim Palsgraaf when they squatted an old jute spinning mill and weaving mill in Leipzig in 2012. It is the title of a 1969 song by the band Amen Corner. A bad song with a great title, according to Palsgraaf and Botlek. They see the dilapidated locations, however spartan, as a paradise for making art.