Marta Dyachenko
ATNA
Association for Transformative Navigability Affairs

The Landwehr Canal has burst its banks and the river water is flooding Potsdamer Strasse. At Klosterfelde we stand ankle-deep in it. Container ships work tirelessly here, transporting materials from A to B. It doesn’t matter where A is, B is irrelevant, and movement is the main thing. The material that the ships usually carry has already become part of them; their hulls are no longer smooth metal, but roughly constructed of rubble and concrete. Does the suggested coastline still serve to hold on to? No, the coast is no longer a destination, only the illusion of a terrestrial sphere that is shrinking into small islands as the sea level rises. The barges behind the coastline no longer navigate on rivers, but on complicated canal systems towards the sluice. The steel structures, with their reflective routes, carry fragments of sunken civilisations on their posts. We see only one part of a planetary infrastructure that spans the globe. This much is clear: it takes an enormous amount of material to overcome the resistance of distance and height to keep the system of global transport in motion.
And there is more in the Berlin water landscape near Klosterfelde, where we stand with wet shoes: A platform full of neatly sorted, colourful rubble. Could this have been an oil platform? This is a vivid illustration of the shift from material to overburden and back to material.