These are their statements about the works which they created there.
I wanted to create a work made from material found on site and to incorporate the unique situation of the Panzerhalle as a major component of the piece. I am interested in borderlands and heartlands: I considered the difference between Scotland and Germany - here most of our land borders are created by nature, with only a small, stable and secure political border with England; Germany, akin to most of the European heartland has a turbulent, dynamic shift of borders and territories. On a personal level, being half-Polish and half-Scottish, I find myself drawn to such complexities of cultural, historical and political crossovers and conflicts.
On the theme of footsteps, I collected fragments of manmade objects found on my walks around Berlin and the Panzerhalle; these were then made into maps, emphasising not only strategic points and borders, but also alluding to the spy-maps created by Baden-Powell during the Balkan Wars in the first part of this century. Gross Glienicke, for those who don't know, was a site for the exchange of intelligence agents during the Cold War. The Panzerhalle, having been developed as a military tank installation during the Great War, then by the Nazis and subsequently the Red Army during the partition of Germany, is still a secret place with land mines, electric cables, watch towers and holes in the ground - remnants and fragments of a turbulent past.
I created two performance works developed from the theme of "heartland: nature versus man". The first piece, "Fragments", involved recreating a unified Germany on my face, Magdeburg being central, Berlin on the chin, etc. Honey was used to fix these positions and this was presented as Europa in her boudoir fixing her face. The second work, "European Sex", another boudoir piece, examined the relationship of strange bedfellows, East and West, coming together, secured by a seamless joint of honey from the conflicting lands. Words, fragments from a common language, were handed out to the audience and these were then stuck to the honeyed seam at the end.
My works reflect tensions and changes in both history and culture through a critical reassessment. Much of the content is absorbed on location and expressed in photography, laser copies, collage and assemblage of found material.
For the Panzerhalle works, the immediate environment is seen in terms of a change of function over four eras of use or abandonment. Situated in Gross Glienicke, a significant wallcrossing of the Cold War years, its hinterland is Brandenburg, Fontaneland, with Romantic ties to the Scotland of Sir Walter Scott. Its recent history might be summated in the changing significance of Albert Einstein's summer home in Caputh, abandoned by the fleeing family in 1933, seized by the Nazis, used by East German Communists and, after years of wrangling since Reunification in 1990, now due to be returned to an unlikely collection of heirs, amid local opposition. Fears of tourism are justified in an area much assailed by speculators, immigrants and ownership disputes in the new Germany.
The final form of the works will be further affected by the site; in particular, the scale and atmosphere of the Panzerhalle, the shape implications of chain-mail, and my age, at fifty, almost identical to both the D-Mark and the State of Israel.
Peter Russell