Video artwork by David Claerbout calculates how nature occupies a Nazi structure in a thousand years

Suppose that in one fell swoop there were no more people living in Berlin, for example due to a nuclear disaster. What would the Olympic Stadium of that city look like in a thousand years? How did the building, designed by Nazi architect Albert Speer for the 1936 Summer Games, fall into ruin? It is a question that the Belgian artist David Claerbout focused on in 2016 when he launched his video work Olympia (The real time disintegration into ruins of the Berlin Olympic stadium over the course of a thousand years).

This phenomenal work of art alone justifies a visit to the exhibition It Might be a Mirage in West The Hague, where nine artists play treacherous games with themes such as time and historiography. In reality, the Berlin Olympia stadium is still in use; Hertha BSC football club is home to it and it is a popular venue for concerts. But in Claerbout’s virtual version, the weeds have already taken over the stands and galleries six years after completion.

Also read this interview with David Claerbout: “You need the real world”

Olympia resembles a slow movie where a camera slides around the stadium in an hour. Those who have the patience to stay seated for so long – do so! – discovers that on the next tour the light has changed. The shadows have lengthened, they correspond to the position of the sun in Berlin, at this time of day and time of year. Runs through an ingenious computer program designed to last for a thousand years Olympia in sync with the real time in Berlin. When the sun sets there around four o’clock in the afternoon, dusk also falls at the artwork in The Hague.

Algorithms

It is not yet possible to predict how the virtual stadium will decay. That partly depends on the extent to which the earth will warm up in the coming millennium. Olympia is constantly fed by live data about weather conditions, seasons, light and local vegetation. The algorithms that control the installation indicate exactly which elements the building will be exposed to over the next thousand years. Anyone who has seen the work before, at exhibitions in New York, Basel or Berlin, will notice that the tender blades of grass that carefully peeped out from between the stones in 2017 or 2018 are now knee-high. It’s amazing how quickly nature overgrows the stadium when there are no people left to maintain it.

The time span of a thousand years is, of course, not unfounded. It is a reference to Hitler’s desire for the immortality of the Third Reich. Architect Speer had the ruins of ancient Rome or Greece in mind when he designed his stadium. According to his ‘Ruinenwert’ theory, a building should be designed so that when it collapsed it would leave behind an aesthetic ruin that, a thousand years later, would testify to the greatness of the civilization it had produced. Claerbout brilliantly bends that theory to his will in a masterpiece that is both conceptual and factual.

In this exhibition, for example, there are more artists who reflect intelligently and intriguingly on the present, past and possible futures. Sometimes they use hard data, such as Claerbout, sometimes they color history with their own imagination. The ‘mirage’ in the title of the exhibition could be interpreted as ‘mirage’. It is never quite clear what is fact and what is fiction – information and illusion are constantly intertwined.

Black and white picture

Take the beautiful installation Traumgutstrasse by the Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski: that ‘sweet dream street’ never existed, but the historical event to which the artwork refers did indeed take place. Kusmirowski made a three-dimensional reconstruction of a destroyed room in the Czapski-Raczynski Palace in Warsaw, which was set on fire by the German army in 1939. The artist, who knew the space only from black and white photographs, recreated the blackened interior, with real burnt furniture and smoldering books in the cupboard. As you walk across the scorched carpet, past the ruined piano and the partially melted portrait photos, history comes to life. Everything that a black and white photo cannot offer – smell, mass, colors – suddenly becomes tangible here. With that Traumgutstrasse a war memorial and time machine in one.

The building that houses West, the former US embassy designed in 1959 by Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, is a perfect backdrop for an exhibition about keeping stories and histories alive. The modernist building is itself a monument to freedom, erected during the Cold War to radiate openness and progressiveness. But inside it still looks like the bureaucratic maze of yesteryear and it seems that the officials can move into their offices at any moment.

In the basement of the embassy, ​​where a cage construction breathes the atmosphere of a prison, you come across an installation that fiercely criticizes the American legal system. Here the German artist Wolfgang Plöger printed the last words of Americans on death row on old 16mm film reels. These film ribbons are not led directly to the projector, but first traverse the space in vertical bands. The words are illegible on the projection screen, but the sentences stand upright on the film ribbons – like bars. One of the three installations shows the last testimony of Shaka Sankofa, a black man who was wrongly convicted of murder when he was 17 years old. “I love you all,” he said before he was executed in Texas in 2000. Here in West’s basement, his words spin endlessly, like an immortal mantra.

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