The installation Ash (10/271) investigates the layered environments of a tree in Treptower Park, Berlin. The ash tree was planted in 1856 and is now the oldest surviving tree in the park. As such, it is a historical witness to the great industrial exhibition of 1896, an event that was crucial to Germany's claims and ambitions to present itself as an economic and technological world power. Colonialism was an integral part of this moment: across the lake, the staged landscapes of the German Colonial Exhibition were intended to bring to life where and at whom the colonial aspirations of the German Empire were directed.

 

Ash (10/271) takes an enlarged reproduction of the official 1896 exhibition map as a base and adds notes, drawings, and other research materials layered over the map, showing what the modern cartographic imagination hid or could not see. 

 

At the same time, on October 15, 2022, the 126th anniversary of the exhibition's closure, a soundscape was recorded near the tree, reminding us of the persistence of both: of this living being as well as of the violence that colonial destruction still brings.