The work of Cologne-based artist Silke Schatz deals with places and their histories, often focussing on the wider architecture as a mirror of certain inherent socio-political conditions and climates. In her most recent and ongoing work series ‘Manheim calling’, started in Summer 2021, Silke Schatz visited the village of Manheim, possibly one of the last villages to be destroyed due to open-cast lignite mining in the Rhineland Region of Germany. Almost entirely abandonded, most of the village and its infrastructures are razed to the gound, with only a few buildings, farms and orchards still remaining. Interested in this limbo of certain conditions, the artist investigates the site by taking photographs, cyanotypes and audio recordings, documenting traces of urban structures in clay and ready-made arrangements, picking fruits to produce jam and juice from it, a work consisting of an archive of ‘shadows’ as a starting point for an artistic examination of the relationship between human and nature.
The website ‘manheim-calling.org’ serves as the digital part and supplement to the work series, photographically documenting the instances of the various indigenous plant life returning to the site of Manheim.
Vanishing point, Meyer Riegger, Berlin, January — March 2024
Parliament of Plants II, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, May — October 2023
Vom Leben in Industrielandschaften II, Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren, December 2021 — March 2022
Manheim calling, Kunsthaus NRW Kornelimünster, November 2021 — February 2022
Kindly supported by
Very Contemporary
The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media
BBK Bundesverband Bildender Künstlerinnen und Künstler
