Michael Schmidt
“Ihme Zentrum. 4 Fotografien, 8 Ausschnitte”



Krystian Woznicki

In Hannover, where I spent my youth in the
1980´s, Linden was a part of the city where
Lower Saxony´s putative bohemia hung out.
The area was known for unusual bars and cafes,
a laid-back-intellectual arthouse cinema and
an alternative event space called Glocksee.
You would go to Linden to get a drink in the
evening or to have brunch on Sunday morning,
to see concerts by bands like Jingo de Lunch
or Motörhead. Before the concerts started you
would sit at the bank of the adjacent river,
the Ihme, and you would, with the upcoming
act in mind, drink some beer to get into the
right mood. This ritual was accompanied by an
unforgettable sight. Like a mountain, the
Ihme Zentrum stood in front of us on the other
side of the river, a complex built between
1972-1975 in the wake of the 1960´s euphoria,
which drove city planners to construct ever
more gigantic building complexes. It was a
relic from the phase of utopian building, from
the technocratic notion of the planability of
social processes - the only one of its kind in
Hannover.

But though that giant appeared to us as a utopia,
it was a fading one however. The pedestrian
walkways had long ago found themselves in a
state of urban decay, one that was familiar
to us from the run down look of the central train
station; the bright colours of the skyscrapers
were no longer shining, the degenerate facades
were overlayed with pollutant-induced patina,
that evoked memories of industrial suburbs like
Neustadt. In short, the complex of more than 800 apartments, offices, shops and the event centre
Capitol, looked like an autonomous city, had
mutated into a space where you wouldn´t want to
be and particularly not at night when, run down
und untidy, it adopted a sinister junkie-look.
It is this space, now being renovated, that
Michael Schmidt in 1997/98 captured and, for
the second edition of DIAMONDPAPER, has transformed
into an original and autonomous piece entitled
“Ihme Zentrum.4 Fotografien, 8 Ausschnitte.”
(“Ihme Zentrum. 4 Photographs, 8 Extracts.”)

The photographer who was born in 1945 became
accessible to a wider public following “Ein-heit”,
a post German unification project suspended between
historic documentarism and conceptual photo-art.
With “Ihme Zentrum”, Schmidt revisits familiar
ground: In book projects like “Berlin - Kreuzberg”
(1973) and “Stadtlandschaften 1981” (1981) he
repeatedly approached the city and time and time
again made it look like a landscape. A lasting
impression is left behind by Schmidt´s Berlin
photographs, which capture with his idiosyncratic
camera-eye forgotten non-spaces. They show the no
man´s land that came into existence during the
separation of East- and West-Berlin, its wild grass
and ruin-like buildings – subjects that appear to
be suspended in a transhistorical state and that
could be elements of those early paintings by
romantic artist William Turner. In Schmidt´s both
objective and painterly pictures, such elements
are rendered in multifarious and almost monochromatic
grey tones and thereby assume a new quality. His photographic aesthetic also sheds new light on the
Ihme Zentrum.

In the first place he captures part of the
architectural complex from a birds´ eye view
and juxtaposes this with a “wall sample” and
then finally he “re-mixes” the building in the
course of a process of de- and subsequent
re-construction. Details from the interior life
of the Ihme Zentrum blend cool minimalism in the
style of the streamlined surfaces of a black 80´s
BMW body-work with the geometric Modernism of constructivist paintings a la Mondrian. This is
a highly formal approach that, along with techniques
such as “extracts” and serializations has been an
ongoing concern in Schmidt´s oeuvre and reaches
a climax here. An approach, which next to the
“x-raying of an amnesia”, as Heinz Liesbrock in
a different context once characterised the work
of Michael Schmidt, is also put into the service
of remixing memories: art historical, urbanist
as well as individual-biographical layers are
dismantled and subsequently sedimented anew in
photographs that, in terms of precision and
refinery, certainly lack soul mates.