artist publication, 96 pages, bw, texts in German and English
€ 7.90, order: www.aprior.org

Published by A Prior Magazine in collaboration with 5th berlin biennial of contemporary art 2008, as part of On Paper, a special collaborative project by A Prior Magazine and 5th berlin biennial

This artist’s book by Susanne Kriemann is a part of 12 650 000, her contribution to the 5th berlin biennial for contemporary art and consists of a profound analysis of the imprint the Schwerbelastungskörper has left in Berlin over the last 65 years or so. It is published as part of On Paper a special collaborative project between A Prior Magazine and 5th berlin biennial.

12650 ton is the official weight of the Schwerbelastungskörper (heavy load bearing body), a concrete cylindrical construction in the city of Berlin. It was constructed in 1941 by Third Reich architect Albert Speer to test the grounds for Adolf Hitler’s highly ambitious, and only fractionally realised, plans to turn Berlin into the so-called Welthauptstadt (World Capital) Germania. The construction still sits in the Tempelhof district of contemporary Berlin – and seems to have become an ineluctable and permanent structure due to its vastness and weight, sunk a little to deeply into Berlin’s soil. Kriemann looks at the mythologising and sometimes retro-materialist documents that have since recorded its existence. What we see in this publication is a superimposition of interpretations - of its weight, its dimensions and (symbolic) properties (including sometimes factually mistaken detail) both visually and textually in the German press from 1950 to the present, giving this single and rather neutral stone a weighty ideological load…
The serial recordings of this merely functionalist structure collected in 12650 reflect the similar-yet-tellingly-different approaches of journalists and photographers, to the point where the original is completely outweighed by concurrent interpretations.

Andrea Wiarda