Kassel Gardens (from the Perspective of a Mole)
2007
Photograph series and projection
documenta 12
Kassel Gardens consists of a projected digital image reel, presented together with photographs on the wall and a wall text describing the locations and sometimes their history. The scenes are spring landscapes of the city of Kassel, Germany, taken in parks, from royal to middle-class to working-class, and in a grand city cemetery. Rosler's pictures of lush nature are interspersed with other views: scattered tiles among the fallen leaves; molehills marring a vast public lawn; a derelict brick bomb shelter in a backyard; a tank parked behind trees; a World War II aerial-reconnaissance photograph of Kassel; a narrow culvert with a stream.
During World War II, the city was strategically important, with an ammunition and tank factory (still in operation), worked at the time by Russian, Polish, and Yugoslav prisoners of war. When the Allies bombed Kassel, these slave laborers sought shelter in a culvert near the rail lines, where they died in large numbers. These references are not readily available to a viewer of the images alone. Like the mole, the artist digs up the city's buried histories, demanding they be seen. Broken tiles, abandoned brickwork: these are the visible signs of a subterranean world of suppressed meanings and memories. The molehills dot the grass like small, scarcely noticed tumuli, or unmarked graves.