Soft Utopian City
Klara Meinhardt
In the large courtyard on the ground floor of the MdbK and clearly visible from a distance, blue glowing elements made of soft material are already piled up. This is the 47-piece installation Soft Utopian City by Leipzig-based artist Klara Meinhardt. It is not just that you are permitted to touch this art – you are supposed to touch it. All visitors, young and old alike, are allowed to move the objects around and arrange them in ever-new constellations. Everyone is free to build their own city, at liberty and full of fantasy.
Klara Meinhardt engages intensively with urban spaces, whether exploring the displacement of nature or the material features of architecture. She takes up the latter in Soft Utopian City. She is just as interested in sustainable construction with natural materials such as wood and local stone as she is in the design possibilities and formative potential inherent in all materials. She also focuses on changes to landscapes caused by the mining of raw materials and the processing of construction debris.
In the installation Soft Utopian City, Meinhardt succeeds in combining urban life with nature. The individual foam elements appear organic. Their forms are borrowed from nature, yet they have been freely invented by the artist. Meinhardt has printed the fabric covers with motifs she came upon in quarries and forests. There she photographed sandstone surfaces and waterways. Included among the motifs are enlarged details of broken glass or a concrete fence in the characteristic geometric GDR design. The photographic printing process that Meinhardt used in the design of the covers is based on the cyanotype technique, which is closely connected to nature.
Cyanotype is a photographic printing process developed in 1842. Originally, sunlight was used to expose the surfaces, and since the end of the 19th century electric light has also been used. Meinhardt works with UV light. She uses cotton fabrics as image carriers, but nettle cloth, paper, wood and stone can also be used. The surfaces are soaked in a light-sensitive solution and then overlaid with objects or stencils that cover the areas that are to be washed out and to appear white in the end. On the exposed areas, the solution transforms into a water-insoluble layer and becomes blue – more precisely, “Berlin blue”.
Soft Utopian City is thus designed to be temporary, just like the cyclicality of nature, which is based on growth, renewal and transience.
We ask you to exercise caution when moving the elements. Use is at your own risk.
