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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cstriated space\u201d that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari described in A Thousand Plateaus <\/em>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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sofie Thorsen\u2019s exhibition Sediments<\/em> 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\u2014or rather, held back from flooding into the gallery space\u2014by horizontal dark metal bars. The undulating photos portray a desert-like, hilly landscape\u2014looking 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014a sprawling cartographic survey of the Danube\u2019s river course, produced as a lithographic print in the run-up to its regulation\u2014is a departure point for the other works in the exhibition. Strokes, dots, lines\u2014abstract symbols for the topography and riverbank zone\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In their intentionally fragmentary nature, Sofie Thorsen\u2019s 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 \u201cGro\u00dfer Sau-Haufen\u201d (Big Sow Heap), \u201cFuchs-Haufen\u201d (Fox Heap), or even just \u201cHaufen\u201d (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\u2019s Gr\u00fcnderzeit 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sofie Thorsen\u2019s 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 \u201cthe map is not the territory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Text: Christina N\u00e4gele, Christian Teckert<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translation: Christine Sch\u00f6ffler & Peter Blakeney<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sofie Thorsen *1971 \u00c5rhus (DK). Lives und work in Vienna.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10637,"template":"","room":[],"class_list":["post-10635","exhibition","type-exhibition","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriekrobath.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibition\/10635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriekrobath.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibition"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriekrobath.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exhibition"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriekrobath.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibition\/10635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10649,"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriekrobath.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibition\/10635\/revisions\/10649"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriekrobath.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriekrobath.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"room","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.galeriekrobath.at\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/room?post=10635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}