Spreepartition

Création d’une œuvre pour le Spreepark Art Space

Description: “Spree Partition”  is a light, undulating textile wall creating a new transient space within an existing architecture. The semitransparent fabric has been silkscreen printed with inks made with pigments produced with recycled architectural waste material: the ruins of the 20th century collected in the Spreepark, Berlin. 
As part of the new Spreepark project under construction (due to open in 2026)  historical buildings and landscape installations are currently being demolished. The rubbles have been collected, sorted out  by nature and color, crushed, and finely sieved to obtain pigments, then formulated with a binder to create a range of textile inks. The marbling patterns created on the textile results from the inks being dragged across the textile, mimicking the movement of geological forces at work over time, or the inexorable impact of time and historical events on architecture. The colors of the bricks, concrete, granite, and asphalt, applied to the textiles, create a new fluid environment in a fixed architectural setting. As fleeting traces of memory, the components of buildings and landscapes that have already disappeared from the park reappear to create a new spatial situation: a place for an encounter with the (material) history of the site. Emancipated from the rigid nature of architecture, the textile partition open up a wide range of  spatial configuration, adaptable to a variety of future uses.
The authors: “Spree Partition” is a collaboration between designer Anna Saint Pierre and artiste Stefan Shankland.
Anna Saint Pierre is a designer. she explores aspects of architectural heritage through the transformation and reintegration of building rubble using experimental methods directly on site. with a background in textile design, she completed her PhD in architectural waste recycling at the laboratory of École des arts Décoratifs in Paris. as an extension of her PhD, she is now exploring the idea of « textilisation » as means to devise new modes of transposition and how debris can be appropriated through textile processes to renew architectural perspectives.
Stefan Shankland is a visual artist and researcher currently lecturing at the ENSA Nantes. Over the last ten years he has been developing the Marbre d’ici project: an artistic experimentation making use of architectural mineral waste as raw material for new projects and works ( https://marbredici.org)
The commissioner:“Spree Partition” was commissioned by Spreepark Art Space and Grün Berlin as part of the exhibition ‘A Matter of Material: on Urban ruins and natural resources,’ that took place in Berlin from the 8th of June to the 4th of August 2024.