#6 Re: ... between ...

This autumn, the Akademie der Künste will show the exhibition Metaxy : Between Destruction and Reconstruction. Metaxy, the ancient Greek word for “between”, stands for the gap that opens up when the old order has broken down and the new one has not yet formed. But what is it that actually takes place when things are in this state? And what is the value of this in-between space? Normally it is considered nothing more than the distance between two points, to be traversed as quickly as possible. Here, in the wake of destruction, it leads from the lost “before” to the open “after”.

W. G. Sebald described this in his essay Luftkrieg und Literatur (published in English as On the Natural History of Destruction) with regard to Germany’s cities after 1945: in the widely circulated before-and-after-photos of destroyed streets, the ruin already appears as the “first stage of a successful reconstruction”, while the political and moral catastrophe disappears behind the promise of renewal.The rupture is smoothed over to give the appearance of continuity. This process is not restricted to architecture. Smoothing over is a fundamental process of our present, and we find it wherever a gap is considered to be an impertinence, and there is a strong desire to close it.

In politics, this desire is particularly strong. Unambiguity is considered a virtue, and the distance between two positions is closed before it can even be measured. Social media only exacerbates this: its immediacy no longer allows time to explore differences.But it has long ceased to be about differentiation.Politics has become merely transactional. As Kathrin Röggla notes in this Akademie-Brief, Donald Trump is even selling milliseconds as a commodity on his social media platform.Subscribers pay to receive advance access to his statements, which can affect the markets. High-frequency trading has led the way: it is no coincidence that financial centres such as Frankfurt, Zurich or New York are located in close proximity to major internet hubs, where latency is lowest and a fraction of a second becomes a competitive advantage.

Exploiting and closing, both economically and politically, are one and the same here. The in-between space shrinks until only the algorithms can operate within it. In the end, the gap is filled and sealed. The human present disappears.

This smoothing over also affects the perception of time. The seamless new beginning requires a Zero Hour, a clean succession of before and after. Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s characters live differently, in a state of simultaneity in which the Second World War, Stalinism, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza coexist, and no event replaces another. That too is an in-between space that is not closed by chronology. The chains of causality, Salzmann writes, only arise in retrospect, out of the need for a panorama.

This is why Salzmann refers to the in-between as the most honest place. What is meant is the effort of enduring the simultaneity of contradictory realities without resolving them. Art does not mediate between the dead of two conflicting parties in order to calculate a tolerable average.It can hold the suffering of both present, even if this does not lead to a common narrative.

The Akademie der Künste takes up this same effort by interrogating its own site. In the context of the International Building Exhibition Interbau 1957, the Hansaviertel neighbourhood was reorganised, and multiple properties were combined for the construction of the Akademie’s new building. The development plan for this ignored the previous street layout and the foundations of the destroyed residential buildings, covering up the traces of the people who had lived there, including Jewish residents who had been expropriated, driven out and murdered. Only a few steps away, on Klopstockstraße, was the headquarters of the Reich Health Office, whose racial policies helped pave the way for the persecution of Sinti and Roma; today, none of this can still be read in the urban landscape. What disappeared here was not only building substance but also the gap itself, in which this violence might still have been legible.For the exhibition, the walls of the former buildings were reconstructed and overlaid with Werner Düttmann’s building. This palimpsest roughens up the smoothed-over history again and opens the gap that reconstruction had closed.

It is here, in this in-between space, that art can nest and ensure that the difference between the histories is not buried. Whether something new grows there or an open wound gapes remains to be seen.

Manos Tsangaris
President of the Akademie der Künste

Anh-Linh Ngo
Vice-President of the Akademie der Künste