CLEAN WATER BAR examples to follow!
Visitors’ streams of ideas and the river Panke, which flows near the Uferhallen, are the subject of a Berliner Schöpfung, a creative drawing of water. Visitors are invited to clean their streams of ideas as well as water from the Panke by enriching it through swirling with oxygen and then clean it on site with a filter. Materials such as charcoal, sand, gravel (in German, all slang words for money), straw, sand, mud (garbage thoughts) are used in their directness to give space to the drinking and sewage water discourse of the city in its segmentation and complexity. Ultraviolet rays clean the water to make it drinkable. The water’s ability to remember substances dissolved in it functions as lastingly and precisely as our memory which stores all experience, without bias.
This is why at the same time as the water is filtered, sound filters with recordings of the streaming Panke, taken at five different points, invite visitors to filter their thoughts. The sound filters reduce visual stimuli and channel the sound of the flowing water of the river Panke. Sound can change the information that is stored in the water. Is it possible to create stimuli of thinking through the process of filtering—stimuli that help us to cleanse ourselves from what is superfluous? Can the sound of the river Panke influence our thoughts? The goal is to increase the resolution ability of the inner eye with the aid of the Panke’s current. The cleansed water can be tasted. New ideas, possibly about the topic of water, can be articulated and discussed. For the duration of the exhibition, the city river will store its coarser substances in a piece of felt with an integrated filter. After the exhibition, the pieces of felt marked by the river’s sand, together with the pure water, will go to public and private institutions in Berlin that are directly responsible for making water available, and for its large-scale consumption. There, the presence of fragments from the river’s water from the action can remind people that the water in Berlin should be freely available to all citizens.
The idea of drawing and filtering an elementary resource in a moderate way, independently and without authorization, is transferrable to other places and people. It is necessary to act wherever the question is raised whether private corporations can, as a matter of course, take long-term possession of the availability, abundance and purity of the elixir water.
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