UKRYTY
HAMBURG,GERMANY
Islands are strange places. In literature, they serve as the setting for struggles for survival; in world politics, they cause a stir by going it alone. Islands are retreats for loners, the outcasts and oddballs. Thomas Morus designed his utopia on an island in order to conceive of a better world. In "Lord of the Flies," the island serves as a lawless space that brings out only the worst in people. People used to banish unpleasant people to islands because islands were secluded places. Like a prison, in 1788 the British established penal colonies on the Australian continent. The island is ambivalent.
Europe's largest inland island is in Hamburg. It, too, is a place of characters and stories, a microcosm accessible only by sea or man-made land routes. If you cross the Brandshofer dike in the evening hours with the S3 in the direction of Wilhelmsburg, on a good day you will see a play of colors from sunlight and evening dew against the backdrop of an approaching cloud massif. The lighting up of industry illuminates the evening sky and is reminiscent of the cyberpunk cinema of the 80s. The person sitting next to you reaches for his cell phone and quickly shares the scenery on Instagram; you yourself share a feeling of romance and curiosity. In the midst of the light-flooded area, with its smokestacks and cranes, surrounded by rising steam, you suspect something undiscovered, something hidden under the bubbling surface, that you want to pursue, that you want to find.
Only a few people know about the significance of the largest district in terms of area - Wilhelmsburg, also called "Little Warsaw" between 1890 and 1922. Built on the backs of predominantly Polish immigrants, the island looks back on two waves of immigration that gave Hamburg a flourishing industry in the early 19th century, as well as prosperity but also reconstruction after the Second World War around 1955. Nevertheless, Wilhelmsburg is seen as a marginal district, its immense heterogeneity reflected in the residential neighborhoods.
In the Nördliches Reiherstiegsviertel (Northern Reiherstieg Quarter), one finds the well-preserved residential buildings that were built in the early industrial age, next to the dike and the view of the meter-high container facades and the harbor with its cranes and ship bridges, which are not infrequently mistaken for residential buildings. About in the middle stands the Kreuzkirche in Kirchdorf. In its shadow, a prefabricated building from the 1970s rises up, surrounded by allotment gardens. Then, to the south, suddenly the rural Moorwerder - here the Kirchdorf concrete blocks end abruptly. Agriculture has been practiced here since the 17th century. Everywhere in between: small paths and wooded areas that serve as retreats for alternative lifestyles.
At the end of the 1970s, redevelopment plans in Wilhelmsburg led to an immigration ban for migrants with the aim of making Wilhelmsburg "livable" again. The head of the district office, Helmut Raloff, marks Turkish people as "not capable of integration". Immigrants of the second and third generation are generalized and declared to be problem cases. People are encouraged to settle in another part of the city, creating new "concentrations of foreigners" such as in Neuwiedenthal. With a migration rate of 60.4% (under 18s, 78.2%), the proportion of migrants on Wilhelmsburg Island is twice as high as the Hamburg average.
Between gentrification and poverty, between cultural center and industrial area, between jungle and concrete, off the streets, on hidden paths, I move and find the faces and traces of the marginal groups, find the invisible and the hidden. Are they parallel societies or merely milieus beyond the visible in a bourgeois metropolis?
To what extent does the insular logic of a self-contained, isolated space within a big city apply? What happens to those who stayed and what kind of people does Wilhelmsburg attract today? Is it an ideal refuge for the socially excluded, who can realize alternative life models undisturbed and unseen on a city island, or is it a breeding ground for ghettoization? Does it pose a threat to an overall metropolitan community?
Islanders like to separate themselves from the mainland. They develop their own identity. They encapsulate themselves. The island exists as a parallel space in the middle of the city. Perhaps even deliberately. The island as a "fallback option," as a place where people have been shipped off to. People who were not wanted in the city. At the same time, islands can also preserve much that is destroyed by external influences. In the Caribbean, for example, it is bird and plant species. In Wilhelmsburg, cultural structures and peculiarities.
If one goes after the hidden, one finds there for example "MC P.G." , the rapping punk of the "Taliban Punks" and his dog Basta under the bridge of the Hafenrandstraße, his fist clenched to the loud call "Oi Oi Oi" resounding into the sky. Stephan, with his art projects made of found objects, he affectionately calls it "garbage". The inhabited tent camps between the container sites and dyke, and the tree houses occupied by left-wing activists in the "Wild Forest". Children playing on tricycles between clotheslines on Stübenplatz. Astrid from the Wilhelmsburger Tafel handing out food. The Weiss family in the east, they are the largest Sinti family in Hamburg in the Georgswerder Ring. The party of a Turkish wedding in the Plaza Event Center in the industrial area or the dock workers behind the Köhlbrand Bridge. They are the figures in between and behind.
The island also exists in our heads. The isolation through the filter bubble. We create niches for ourselves and try to isolate ourselves. I want to continue to explore this field of tension of the island photographically.
The visible and the hidden, they are close to each other, in Wilhelmsburg.
© Bartosz Ludwinski 2010 - 2022, Disclaimer & Privacy Policy
UKRYTY
HAMBURG,GERMANY
Islands are strange places. In literature, they serve as the setting for struggles for survival; in world politics, they cause a stir by going it alone. Islands are retreats for loners, the outcasts and oddballs. Thomas Morus designed his utopia on an island in order to conceive of a better world. In "Lord of the Flies," the island serves as a lawless space that brings out only the worst in people. People used to banish unpleasant people to islands because islands were secluded places. Like a prison, in 1788 the British established penal colonies on the Australian continent. The island is ambivalent.
Europe's largest inland island is in Hamburg. It, too, is a place of characters and stories, a microcosm accessible only by sea or man-made land routes. If you cross the Brandshofer dike in the evening hours with the S3 in the direction of Wilhelmsburg, on a good day you will see a play of colors from sunlight and evening dew against the backdrop of an approaching cloud massif. The lighting up of industry illuminates the evening sky and is reminiscent of the cyberpunk cinema of the 80s. The person sitting next to you reaches for his cell phone and quickly shares the scenery on Instagram; you yourself share a feeling of romance and curiosity. In the midst of the light-flooded area, with its smokestacks and cranes, surrounded by rising steam, you suspect something undiscovered, something hidden under the bubbling surface, that you want to pursue, that you want to find.
Only a few people know about the significance of the largest district in terms of area - Wilhelmsburg, also called "Little Warsaw" between 1890 and 1922. Built on the backs of predominantly Polish immigrants, the island looks back on two waves of immigration that gave Hamburg a flourishing industry in the early 19th century, as well as prosperity but also reconstruction after the Second World War around 1955. Nevertheless, Wilhelmsburg is seen as a marginal district, its immense heterogeneity reflected in the residential neighborhoods.
In the Nördliches Reiherstiegsviertel (Northern Reiherstieg Quarter), one finds the well-preserved residential buildings that were built in the early industrial age, next to the dike and the view of the meter-high container facades and the harbor with its cranes and ship bridges, which are not infrequently mistaken for residential buildings. About in the middle stands the Kreuzkirche in Kirchdorf. In its shadow, a prefabricated building from the 1970s rises up, surrounded by allotment gardens. Then, to the south, suddenly the rural Moorwerder - here the Kirchdorf concrete blocks end abruptly. Agriculture has been practiced here since the 17th century. Everywhere in between: small paths and wooded areas that serve as retreats for alternative lifestyles.
At the end of the 1970s, redevelopment plans in Wilhelmsburg led to an immigration ban for migrants with the aim of making Wilhelmsburg "livable" again. The head of the district office, Helmut Raloff, marks Turkish people as "not capable of integration". Immigrants of the second and third generation are generalized and declared to be problem cases. People are encouraged to settle in another part of the city, creating new "concentrations of foreigners" such as in Neuwiedenthal. With a migration rate of 60.4% (under 18s, 78.2%), the proportion of migrants on Wilhelmsburg Island is twice as high as the Hamburg average.
Between gentrification and poverty, between cultural center and industrial area, between jungle and concrete, off the streets, on hidden paths, I move and find the faces and traces of the marginal groups, find the invisible and the hidden. Are they parallel societies or merely milieus beyond the visible in a bourgeois metropolis?
To what extent does the insular logic of a self-contained, isolated space within a big city apply? What happens to those who stayed and what kind of people does Wilhelmsburg attract today? Is it an ideal refuge for the socially excluded, who can realize alternative life models undisturbed and unseen on a city island, or is it a breeding ground for ghettoization? Does it pose a threat to an overall metropolitan community?
Islanders like to separate themselves from the mainland. They develop their own identity. They encapsulate themselves. The island exists as a parallel space in the middle of the city. Perhaps even deliberately. The island as a "fallback option," as a place where people have been shipped off to. People who were not wanted in the city. At the same time, islands can also preserve much that is destroyed by external influences. In the Caribbean, for example, it is bird and plant species. In Wilhelmsburg, cultural structures and peculiarities.
If one goes after the hidden, one finds there for example "MC P.G." , the rapping punk of the "Taliban Punks" and his dog Basta under the bridge of the Hafenrandstraße, his fist clenched to the loud call "Oi Oi Oi" resounding into the sky. Stephan, with his art projects made of found objects, he affectionately calls it "garbage". The inhabited tent camps between the container sites and dyke, and the tree houses occupied by left-wing activists in the "Wild Forest". Children playing on tricycles between clotheslines on Stübenplatz. Astrid from the Wilhelmsburger Tafel handing out food. The Weiss family in the east, they are the largest Sinti family in Hamburg in the Georgswerder Ring. The party of a Turkish wedding in the Plaza Event Center in the industrial area or the dock workers behind the Köhlbrand Bridge. They are the figures in between and behind.
The island also exists in our heads. The isolation through the filter bubble. We create niches for ourselves and try to isolate ourselves. I want to continue to explore this field of tension of the island photographically.
The visible and the hidden, they are close to each other, in Wilhelmsburg.
© Bartosz Ludwinski 2010 - 2022, Disclaimer & Privacy Policy