About the exhibition

Our understanding of landscape, of territory, is permeated by phantasms of order, demarcation, boundaries, and lines. Rivers like the Danube and their dynamics, their inherent ecosystemic logic, are diametrically opposed to these figures of spatial division, control, and plannability.

The Danube basin as we know it today is the product of a centuries-long venture to tame these dynamics, culminating in the great Danube regulation of the mid-19th century and the accompanying industrialization of the water landscape. But the straightening of a waterway, and every associated new demarcation, always entails the risk of transgression. The colonization of the landscape, its appropriation and industrialization, produced the “striated space” that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari described in A Thousand Plateaus as being a sign of the emergence of nation states with their clear borderlines, the efficiency-oriented allocation of functions to its constituent parts, and the disciplining of individuals in its institutions. 

Sofie Thorsen’s exhibition Sediments can be read as a spatialized investigation into the colonization of the landscape and the transience of sand and debris. Large-format, heavy rolls of paper with photographic prints curling from the wall are kept in shape—or rather, held back from flooding into the gallery space—by horizontal dark metal bars. The undulating photos portray a desert-like, hilly landscape—looking more carefully, however, they are close-ups of sand and mud: alluvial deposits from the flooding that the rivers in Vienna and Lower Austria carried with them in the autumn of 2024 in the wake of massive rainfall. The Danube became a wide, torrential current that washed over everything. What remained was sand, mud, and anything else the water had swept along. In layers and piles, blanketing the earth, forming new landscapes.

The present-day Danube, nestled in a straightened riverbed as a tamed waterway for the transportation of goods, is a relatively new phenomenon. The Pasetti Map—a sprawling cartographic survey of the Danube’s river course, produced as a lithographic print in the run-up to its regulation—is a departure point for the other works in the exhibition. Strokes, dots, lines—abstract symbols for the topography and riverbank zone—a clumsy attempt to describe the hydrographic conditions of a river landscape in a state of permanent flux, to suspend a specific moment in time. As if it were possible to precisely document and control the shorelines, the currents, the heaps of sand, the sediments. An epic encounter between a force of nature and the organizing and disciplining mechanisms of plan representation.

In their intentionally fragmentary nature, Sofie Thorsen’s engravings in limestone plates restore a certain dignity to the cartographic endeavors to map an intangible reality. Consisting of lines and dots, with titles such as “Großer Sau-Haufen” (Big Sow Heap), “Fuchs-Haufen” (Fox Heap), or even just “Haufen” (Heap), the engravings dissect the hydrographic representations in the Pasetti map, citing facets of the graphic work to capture the fluid materiality and its topography. The engravings are made on slabs from the Solnhofen quarries on the Danube: limestone slabs were used not only as lithographic plates but also as flooring material in Vienna’s Gründerzeit houses. As such, these architectures created from the profits of the colonization and industrialization of an exploited landscape represent a part of the vast metabolism in which extracted and redeployed material and resources circulate. A metabolism, like that of the hegemonic political economy, that factors out externalities. Sand, as crushed remnants from a former mountain massif, signifies a transformation of material from one aggregate state to another, but also the radically fluid and mobile structure of territory, which can only consist of an endless series of moments.

Sofie Thorsen’s meticulous survey pinpoints creative strategies of representing nature, which tend to present it as a precisely quantifiable and delineable factor but ultimately cannot escape the dictum “the map is not the territory.”

Text: Christina Nägele, Christian Teckert

Translation: Christine Schöffler & Peter Blakeney

Sofie Thorsen *1971 Århus (DK). Lives und work in Vienna.