Time Roaming in One Square

There are only a few squares left in my surroundings where the traces of different present worlds lie so raw next to each other, where they complement and intermingle, contradict each other and lead out into the open. Many squares are evenly concreted over, levelled, smoothed according to a DIN standard so that nobody trips and falls. On Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz, on the other hand, the surface changes from old, crumbling asphalt to gravel to grass to paving slabs to cobblestones to sand and back again. In between, shards and stones roam, weeds, bushes, trees proliferate — as do past, present and future. Buildings are sparse, their function difficult to determine. For many decades, the square has eked out an existence as a wasteland with occasional use, despite being around six hectares in size and located right in Leipzig’s city centre. In the upheaval of the post-reunification period, an urban void like this represented a space of opportunity in which one could mentally alternate between new awakenings and depression. Leipzig was one of the shrinking cities in East Germany. By the end of the 1990s, the city had lost around ten per cent of its population due to emigration and falling birth rates. Since 2010, the trend has reversed. Today, the population has grown by twenty per cent and the city is increasing in density. Open space is becoming scarce. A large central wasteland such as Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz is unusual and, in a strange sort of way, attractive.

Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz is familiar to me. I grew up in Leipzig and have been living here again for a few years now. When I try to remember things I observed or experienced in my childhood connected with the square, I only find blurred images in my memory. They fit well with its present state. I often cross the square, but usually without perceiving it as a place in its own right. It is a transit space that I prefer to cycle rather than walk over, because it is quicker. At first glance, there is hardly anything to see or any reason to linger.

With their work Asphalt, Steine, Scherben, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz dedicated themselves for around twelve years to the conditions and layers of time in Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz. In the cracks in the asphalt, the remnants of the architecture and the gatherings of people, they search for the specific features that characterise this place, its history, and also its potential. From 2012, around 1,500 analogue photographs were taken, in medium format and mostly in black and white. In the images, the square, in all its vastness, is scarcely visible; instead, in its many fragments and perpetual unfinished state, it appears like a backdrop whose many layers unfold in Asphalt, Steine, Scherben. The artists view the urban expanse like a stage, moving into its middle and observing nature, architecture and the legacies of various uses, mostly from close up. They follow the socio-political debates surrounding the design of the square and the attempts to occupy it with ideas and ideologies. They deal with the people who use the square in pursuit of their aspirations, pleasures and needs. By working as a duo, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz turn documentary observation into a productive dialogue that ultimately leads to a long-term conversation on how to position themselves in relation to the square and record it photographically.

With the first photographs in the book, we step onto Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz in the darkness of night. Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz set their flashes working in the night to create a focussed gaze. They expose what is being photographed, while the background sinks into black. Their observations remain mere hints, sometimes easier, sometimes more difficult to classify. In terms of motifs, the photographs are primarily characterised by nature, which takes its own space, and traces of human activity. Empty concrete flower boxes, trees that have long since been sawn down and charred branches, floor tiles in the midst of wild growth, parts of buildings sprayed with graffiti, a guard stone without the building it is supposed to protect,¹ a broken or collapsed entrance to a cellar vault. Among the dark imagery, the bright picture of a distillation apparatus lights up. The machine is as enigmatic as its presence somewhere in the square. Two figures piggyback through the darkness. The obscured view of the context of these photographic observations creates a vacuum. In another image, thick roots grow between evenly placed bricks, symbolically charged. At the top, this tangled growth has been sealed with asphalt and is laid bare here like a cut through time. Grass has long since grown over it. Such compressed anthropogenic deposits on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz extend to a depth of around six metres before the geological layers begin.²

Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz began their work Asphalt, Steine, Scherben in their late twenties while studying in Joachim Brohm’s photography and media class at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. At this age and at this point in their studies, many artists are trying out artistic languages, becoming more independent and developing their own artistic attitude. It is fitting that Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz chose to focus on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz, an area that has been a wasteland for decades and is in a state of limbo in terms of urban design and urban development. An interest in urban space is something they share with Joachim Brohm. For his work Areal, he photographed the stratifications and changes in a commercial and industrial area in the north of Munich from 1992 to 2002.³ Like Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz, he returned several times to interrogate this place, which was similarly difficult to grasp. The Munich area is characterised less by emptiness than by an overabundance of things. It offers many visual anchor points, while Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz defies simple legibility, and its characteristic shape only unfolds under deep visual examination.

Biographically, in terms of Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz and the square they have photographed, it is worth taking a few steps further back to get a clearer picture of the background noise that accompanies Asphalt, Steine, Scherben. Dana Lorenz was born in East Berlin in 1984 and Sophia Kesting, like me, was born in Leipzig in 1983. We were born in the 1980s into a country that celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 1989 and shortly afterwards ceased to exist. As young people in the post-reunification period, we witnessed the euphoria of new beginnings, hope and its disappointment, our rapidly changing everyday world and also a great sense of helplessness. Many opportunities suddenly stood before us and our families, and at the same time, somehow they didn’t. In their recently published book, Anett Gröschner, Peggy Mädler and Wenke Seemann “prefer to speak of East German experiences rather than of an East German identity, because the latter sounds so fixed again and no longer like a fluid, constantly changing construct imposed on us, which we conjure up, which we constantly reassemble from memories and imprints”.⁴ Life in East Germany before and after 1990 was too varied to be summarised by ascribing it to a typical identity dominated by one state. Instead, it is worth exploring how we were shaped individually and observing how differently we remember our experiences, and how we build on them in future.

Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz open small time capsules with short texts placed between their pictures. With fragmentary memories, they evoke experiences, describe what has been seen, heard, smelled and felt, as well as what they do not know or do not remember. They try to capture in words how history is inscribed in the body, how we internalise the past and how we encounter the past in the present. The splinters of memory are inserted between the photographs like a subtext, accentuating their own imprint. In this way, these splinters selectively redirect our gaze from Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz as a public place to the individual experiences of two people, some of which can be described as spanning generations while others are hardly remembered in this way by anyone.

Like the scattered splinters of memory, the history of Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz has many loose ends. Some were picked up again later, others are buried or, in their rawness, difficult to read. The square was originally known as Königsplatz. From the end of the 19th century, during Leipzig’s transformation into an industrial and trade-fair city, it was given prestigious buildings, a market hall, a museum, a panorama, a cinema, hotels and department stores. In the mid-1920s, a substation was added to provide a steady supply of electricity to the city centre, which, in addition to the underground storage rooms of the market hall, also contributed to the undermining of the square and was in operation until the mid-1960s. No further expansion took place due to the heavy air raid on the night of 3–4 December 1943. The bombs damaged a large proportion of the buildings in the city centre. After the end of the Second World War, the largely destroyed Königsplatz and its immediate surroundings were given the name of the resistance fighter Wilhelm Leuschner, who had taken part in the assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944. The rubble from the buildings on this square, as well as that of the entire city, was removed by rubble trains until the mid-1950s.⁵ Part of the wartime debris can still be found in the basement of the central market hall; fragmentary remains of the destroyed buildings symbolise the history of the 20th century turned to stone and have been photographed by Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz.

The clearing of the rubble in the post-war period was documented by Johannes Widmann, who was Professor of Photography at the Academy of Visual Arts from 1946.⁶ He often photographed from within the very midst of the clod-like rubble. In his photographs, the remains of buildings and bent steel still stick out of the mountains of debris alongside the rubble railway tracks. The stacked bricks seem like a promise to the future that something new can grow again from this indeterminate place. Some of the owners at the time checked the structural stability of their damaged buildings and submitted applications for reconstruction but were rejected.⁷ As a result, Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz was already a place in limbo during this period. When Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz began photographing the square around fifty years later, the limbo still existed, it had just taken on a different form.

After the demolition of the ruined buildings by the end of the 1950s,⁸ the square took on its current appearance. It was now largely levelled and asphalted, with shrubs and trees beginning to encroach from the edges. The only additions were a pedestrian tunnel to the city centre in 1975 and the Bowlingtreff bowling alley in 1986/1987. Since the early 1990s, various stakeholders have been debating how best to revitalise the brownfield site with new development.⁹ In 2011, the city council decided that a freedom and unity monument on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz should commemorate the peaceful revolution of 1989. Architectural firms drew up new development plans several times. Various competitions were held, but decisions were thrown out due to excessive resistance within the city council. In the meantime, the pedestrian tunnel had to make way for an underground commuter railway line. It was finally decided that a new market hall, educational and research centres, flats and a park landscape should be built. A second competition for the monument was launched in 2022 and the initial excavation of a construction pit at the south-east end of the square began recently.¹⁰

A large, empty and centrally located square is an ideal place for people to come together and express their interests, demands and desires in public. The events organised by the city, the initiatives of associations and the demonstrations that took place on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz paradigmatically reflect the history of the 20th and 21st centuries: The metropolitan flair that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century with the new shopping and entertainment facilities on the square came to an abrupt end in 1938. The three local Jewish department stores were destroyed during the Kristallnacht pogrom. In 1954, still in the shadow of the war, the joint Protestant Church Congress of the FRG and GDR opened under the motto “Be joyful in hope”. In 1959, the Soviet Union’s foreign minister, Nikita Khrushchev, emphasised the new German-Soviet friendship at the opening of the spring trade fair. In 1965, around two thousand “beat friends” demonstrated against the ban on beat music in the GDR and were subjected to brutal attacks by the Volkspolizei.¹¹ The Monday demonstrations of 1989 marched past Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz. Up until the early 2000s, hundreds of ravers partied largely unseen and undisturbed in the vaulted cellar of the former market hall, in the middle of the city and without public authorisation or attention.¹² In recent years, people have gathered for climate strikes or for resistance against the right. In between, Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz has served as a car park and a place for public festivals or simply to relax in or roam around. How do such events shape a square and what traces can still be found?

In the pictures of Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz, past events are mirrored in the current use of the square. People can be seen standing, squatting, sitting and lying on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz, looking remarkably indifferent as they do so. A certain sense of togetherness can be seen in the complementary relationship between the bodies. It is difficult to tell whether they are celebrating or demonstrating. There is enough space for both. The majority of the people photographed are of a similar age to the artists. They are representatives of a post-reunification generation that has to deal with its legacy and is in a position to shape the development of the urban society. In two photographs, a man looks questioningly at the sky, as if something unusual, perhaps even unsettling, can be seen there. We do not learn what it is, but in the background the New Town Hall and the City-Hochhaus skyscraper parenthetically locate the scene in the urban context of Leipzig’s city centre. In two other portraits, the subjects look directly into the camera and thus out of the book. Their questioning, determined, critical gazes address us as viewers as we leaf through the book. Uncertainty strikes us as we view a young woman standing in front of a weathered iron gate. With her gaze, she asks whether she should enter or not — and metaphorically, whether she can take possession of a place or not. An echo of this feeling of uncertainty can be found in an election poster without a motif. It hangs on a lamppost like a projection screen for various desires and slogans. This blank space waiting to be filled is further developed in the banners that Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz make visible from behind. Sections of other posters and flags can be seen that carry meaningful symbolism. The slogan “Refugees Welcome” stands for the anti-Legida movement, a cat represents anti-fascism and anarchy. We can only decipher either of them by analysing the fragments. At the same time, the symbols tell us which demonstrations the artists were present at. A German flag with a gold stripe torn out represents a more fundamental critique. Whether it coincides with the motivation with which the hammer, compass and spike wreath were cut out of GDR flags as representatives of socialism at the end of the 1980s, or whether it fundamentally questions the idea of the nation state, remains an open question.

In Asphalt, Steine, Scherben, the fragmentarily recorded postures and the lighting chosen echo the 1989 movement, when citizens marched around the inner ring road in the fight for free elections and a free country. In the late 1980s, the protests took place in the evening so that darkness could cover the demonstrators. Unlike Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz, photographers before the Wall fell did not use a flash, in order to avoid being tracked down by the secret police. To capture the events in as much depth as possible, Evelyn Richter, then a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, managed to obtain highly sensitive films through her contacts in the West and handed them over to the students with the words: "Now it's your turn!"¹³ She felt that she was too old for this herself, but world history was happening right there and it needed to be captured.

In the centre of Asphalt, Steine, Scherben are three portraits of women that differ from the others in the way they are posed. All three worked in bowling alleys, one of them in fact in the Bowlingtreff on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz. With these women, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz give the leisure centre, which closed in 1997, a contemporary face. The building has been an important protagonist and has an adventurous history. As a pioneering project, the planning of the Bowlingtreff broke the stagnation on the square and was a response to the increasingly negative mood among the city’s population. As one of the few East German representatives of postmodern architecture, the building was constructed in 1986/1987 and offered the opportunity to practise the American sport of bowling, play pool, use slot machines and a fitness room.¹⁴ Leipzig city council only reported the necessary financing and construction plans bit by bit to East Berlin. Construction began with the basement floors in the disused transformer station and was therefore largely invisible at first. When the budget was almost completely used up, the construction managers utilised so-called “local reserves”. For the Bowlingtreff, this meant that local residents volunteered countless hours of work to help complete the building. Appropriately enough, the bowling lanes were intended for use by the general public, as they were deliberately designed to be a little too short and therefore not suitable for competitions.¹⁵

When Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz photographed the Bowlingtreff, it had already been closed for more than fifteen years. After various plans for its future use, the city council decided in 2020 that the Natural History Museum should move into the building. In Asphalt, Steine, Scherben, the interim state of the building persists. The photographs highlight the postmodern architectural elements, capturing traces of its original use and later uninvited visitors, as well as its changes and decay. Here, too, the artists use flashes to illuminate what they have found. This changes the contours of the objects, making them appear artificial and creating unnatural shadows. The architecture takes on a somewhat spooky appearance. Black, dystopian-looking holes open up in windows and wall openings. White tiles make a clinical impression. Ventilation shafts, stacks of plates, supporting structures and the still look like abstract, artificial objects. The patina that has accumulated on the walls and fragments of furnishings over the years casts them in a particular light. The flash of a camera illuminates the dark rooms and brings out the foreground against the background, freezing movements in fractions of a second. In the case of the Bowlingtreff, these are the movements of decay, which progress slowly and almost imperceptibly.

With their visual language, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz draw on the photographic experiments of the late 1980s and thus transfer the atmosphere associated with them into the present. Maria Sewcz’s photographs are echoed in their cropping and condensation of what is observed. In 1987, she created a seismographic study of East Berlin with the group of works inter esse, in which she underscores the immediacy of her observations of urban life with a distinctive use of perspective and light.¹⁶ The radical contrasts, ruptures and pictorial combinations of portraits, rank growth and urban fragments in Asphalt, Steine, Scher­ben also recall Michael Schmidt’s Waffenruhe, who in like manner translated the leaden mood and fragility of West Berlin society before the fall of the Wall into photographs.¹⁷ In terms of motifs, a connection can be made with Erasmus Schröter’s Wartenden. Between 1980 and 1985, he photographed people waiting in Leipzig at night with an infrared camera and wrote in 2009: “As someone crossing the border between dream and reality, I moved through the dark nights of waiting.”¹⁸ What are Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz waiting for in their photographic exploration? And what do we expect from a place like Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz?

When leafing through the stream of images of Asphalt, Steine, Scherben, one is struck by the many hands in the photographs. There are hands pointing or hands touching something, such as difficult-to-categorise stones. Some of the hands are holding bottles, candles, posters, flags or spotlights. These gestures are meaningful and are reminiscent of scientific or technical photographs, the purpose of which can hardly be fathomed by outsiders without explanation. Shifting such images into the context of art creates a particular tension, as the original argumentation leads nowhere. The complexity of the photographed activities and scientific equipment becomes evident, and the images are practically demanding to be filled with meaning. With their project Evidence (1975–1977), Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan were among the first artists to work with this tension. They recombined found photographs from science, politics and industry, thereby accentuating recurring gestures and typical pictorial elements. Unlike Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz photographed their images themselves. When working together, the pointing hand was sometimes visible and mobile phones used for test photos would also enter the frame. The artists’ photographic tools are also present in Asphalt, Steine, Scherben. Initially, they had set up photo studio backgrounds in the square to pick out found objects or people from their surroundings. In the course of the project, they deliberately placed such evidence of their own working process in the picture, making their tools visible and thus underlining their role as visual researchers. The artists take portraits of each other as they prepare their shots or take photographs with their cameras, two medium-format Mamiya 7s. The cameras are granted a special appearance in the series of images. A Mamiya with an extra grip, on-camera flash and white shining bounce card stands on the edge of a wall. In one picture, a hand with a mobile phone protrudes into the frame, making the camera appear sculpturally solid and reassuring, but also a little dinosaur-like. The camera looks out of the picture towards us with its lens, reminding us of the act of recording and fixing a present that includes us.

“Photographs allow us to return to the past. They are a corrective, they sharpen our view of the past and of ourselves,” reads a display that was located on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz as part of the f/stop photography festival in Leipzig in 2018. The installation Das Jahr 1990 freilegen contained texts by Elske Rosenfeld, Christian Bochert and Jan Wenzel as well as photographs by Andreas Rost that examined the year after the Wall fell and the role of photography as a means of documenting the events. For Asphalt, Steine, Scher­ben, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz photographed parts of the installation, thus adding to their reflections on their medium. The flash of the camera also assumes a special role here, as the reflection of the flash reveals the not entirely flat surfaces of the photographs papered onto the wall and thus also the limits of what can be seen in history’s pictorial space. Photographs are just as limited in their depth as they are at their edges. When we look at them, we can only see into them up to a certain point because the frame of the photographic images cuts the past into rectangles and filters the memory. Eventually, in the depths of the image details, the noise of the film material sets in, after which nothing more can be recognised. With Asphalt, Steine, Scherben, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz explore the past and its continued progression with contemporary photography instead of resorting to historical photographs. Researching a potential future with a medium so closely linked to a particular point in time can seem paradoxical, even more so on a site that has come to a virtual standstill.

In the interplay of the photographs, their counterparts on the double pages and in the dramatic structure of the series, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz’s observations and questions come together like a mosaic with its own logic. In the sequence of images, the artists have woven together references to different temporalities. Traces of the past are juxtaposed with the observed present to track a future that has already been laid out. They do not work their way through past events chronologically, nor do they sort their pictures according to the date they were taken, but instead bring their photographic observations into a dialogue with one another, creating friction and tension and thus dissolving temporal continuities. The artists proceed in the same way with the geographical localisation of what they photograph. Spatial axes, what is above and below ground, inside and outside all become blurred as you leaf through the images. In some places, the pictures condense into themes such as protest or an interrogation of architecture. Other themes announce themselves with one or two images and are only fully developed later, or the reverse, where a single image picks up on something as if it were a later addendum. For example, early on in the book a candle with a windbreak alludes to demonstrations and towards the end a sombre nocturnal scene echoes the dark atmosphere of the intro. Like punctuation marks that provide structure, Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz have regularly sprinkled fragments of the present between the thematic condensations: messages and comments left behind by passersby, gatherings of people, temporary usages, signs of the nascent building site for the new development and the photographic equipment that bears witness to their own presence. The placement of these images might also be described as a recurring echo that creates it own space and reverberation.

A special motif emerged when Sophia Kesting and Dana Lorenz repeatedly pointed their cameras at the ground, as if photographically surveying the square. For once, the artists used colour film. In the pictures, the asphalt surface looks like a washed-over sandy beach in which small stones and shimmering shards have become stuck and where the water flowing back into the ground leaves traces in the form of indentations that are washed away by the next wave. The indentations are in fact scars of the events whose traces have been incorporated into the square over decades. They represent the remnants of the past that have not yet been built over and are still exposed for viewing. Before something new is created, we can pause with these photographs on the square and, with this knowledge of the past, speculate about the future ourselves.