As part of EMOP Berlin – European Month of Photography

The city and the city limits, from the urban to the peripheral, from suburban housing projects to the countryside—RAND brings together two projects from the field of landscape photography: SALTROAD by Verena Hägler and Agglomerationen by Nicola Reiter. Both examine the shifting landscape along Munich’s city limits. Now this project comes to Berlin-Hellersdorf, a neighborhood usually thought of as out-of-town, in the middle of nowhere, a peripheral zone. What are the similarities and differences in the ways we treat inner cities, suburbia, and the surrounding countryside? The site-specific installation at station urbaner kulturen uses photographs, projections, and sound, as well as texts and interventions outside, to enter into dialog with the venue’s surroundings and with local residents. 

Shaped by different personal backgrounds, the two featured views of the edgelands around Munich are occasionally in conflict: For SALTROAD, Verena Hägler photographed a changing transit space in an agriculturally used area on the outskirts of Munich. The photographic fragments form a mosaic that describes the area’s broader features. The photographs are supplemented by a text section: in anonymous interviews, residents speak about various issues including housing and the landscape. In Agglomerationen, Nicola Reiter examined the city outskirts as an area of ​​transition from urban space to landscape. She travelled the periphery of Munich with her camera and supplemented her own images with historical photographs bearing evidence of drastic change. The works search out the ways in which built space and landscape enter into a relationship with one another.

A publication (RAND, Spector Books, 2022) is available in the exhibition and bookstores.

nGbK work group station urbaner kulturen: Jochen Becker, Eva Hertzsch, Margarete Kiss, Constanze Musterer, Adam Page, Katharina Ziemke