The shadow of the cooling tower looms large, its presence seen and felt from afar does not diminish when finally arriving at its base. The humm and noise from the crashing water
inside and the constant buzz of the high voltage substation and cables nearby fill the air.

The landscape it has been set into has seen intervention
before, has known transformations since millennia.
It had been formed and reformed, it changed and was hidden away under masses of ice and flattened by the many lines of the river Aare.

It is a landscape of flows, of a fluvial character,
it used to meander steadily, change was inevitable,
but it does no more.

A century ago the river was divided, the landscape altered to fulfill the demand for the new thing: electricity.

A channel was built cutting through the farmlands and
marshes in the lowland of the Niederamt.
Its steady slope, the high volume of water, incessant and calmly moving between its barriers rises out of the valley ground, contrasts against the leveled continuity of the land surrounding it.
The rows of poplar trees atop its crown underline the
steadiness and continuity of its gradient.

The Oberwasserkanal is the first major anthropogenic
topographical intervention to shape this land.
It changed its character a hundred years ago.
Built by a myriad of mostly Italian guest workers it marks a clear horizon.

The channel left a mark in the continuous lines that draw along the topography, it was drawn into them as a rigid line with purpose and pragmatic precision.

This new topography now reveals a barrier, a plateau,
a landfill, that holds all the rubble unused for the
construction. It extends the raised land at its point of greatest tension and pushes the meander of the Alte Aare away from the smooth line the channel further into the landscape.

The power plant of the early 20th century and later in the 1970s the Nuclear plant which its landmark the cooling tower led to a net of high voltage lines criss-crossing through the Niederamt and from there to everywhere:
the veins of our current time.

Pylons, substations, pump stations, plough lines, pyramids, sewage treatment-plants, workshops, deer paths, hedges, toilet paper factories, Robidog bins, steam pipelines,
danger signs and fences trace this landscape,
creating connections and connectors,
movements and barriers.
Signs of human activity all over it:
landscape of the Anthropocene.

Is it beautiful?
Does this matter?

In my memory, the Niederamt has always been a place you pass through on a train ride.
A horizontal landscape, strips out of the window -
the cloud machine its vertical marker.

You maintain speed and direction. No need to stay.
Once,
I remember,
I was there for a while.
I was ten or eleven.
It was a field trip to to a mythical place: the Atomkraftwerk.
I remember clearly the tower reemerging to our view as we walk out of the train station.
I remember the tower.
Its strangeness, its indifference to distance and to the place.
Like a mountain blankly it stares into the landscape
without expression,
serene.


Today its indifference to distance and movement strikes me the same way as it did then.

I choose to experience this landscape as a wayfarer in a
series of walks drawing my lines as I move through this landscape. Not connecting two places with each other but experience and map the spaces between two random points. Crossing zones blanches, white spots, render them visible through the movement of my body.
The only constant remains the presence of the tower.

These walks told me of a landscape layers and lines, of history and stories, Landscape as a palimpsest.
A landscape of mending and forming, of maintenance and maintenance activities.

maintaining movement.
maintaining use.
maintaining growth.
maintaining protection.
maintaining power.
maintaining order.
maintaining difference.
maintaining temperature.
maintaining flux.
maintaining security.
maintaining fitness
maintaining nature
maintaining direction
maintaining water

The steam cloud of the tower remains a marker, an indication.
The two arms of the Aare, the ponds in the forest, the fountains and water pumping stations all feed themselves the the same source:
water.

The two river arms of the Aare are accompanied by a third river, an invisible stream of ground water visualized only through small infrastructural buildings scattered around the Landscape.
The project proposed is a serendipic journey through the Aareinsel. Its aim is to draw a narrative line, a suggestion, that does not currently exist. it is an insertion into the network of ways and paths that creates once again a meandering line moving from the solid ground of the Mülidörfli through the manmade plateau of the Fröschenweiher landfill, through the Schachenforest towards the now visible third river, the mirror d’eau.

It uses the means of maintenance and intervention that had been used here before.
The excavator and the bulldozer, terraforming.

It proposes to read the landscape with wonder about the small gardens under the high-voltage Pylons that emerge among the trees, or to observe the Robidog-processions, a procession where the next point is to be discovered through movement creating a connector with a small red bag in hand, or the architectural wonders and generous presents that lay all around the cooling tower.

The interventions are site specific.
They draw form the histories and the spirit of the place.
They are imagined and reimagined through through
specific research and investigations and filtered through the somatic, subjective lens of the wayfarer.

The two interventions are earthworks,
moving matter to create connections,
to redraw lines to create points of entanglement
before the movement continues.


Line and place.

The earthworks are accompanied by a set of two almost
similarly formed limestone elements sourced from nearby quarries,
as it has been done for centuries.
The Limestone has its own presence in the landscape,
revealing lacers of its geological history that are strewn along the arms of the Alte Aare.

The elements can be placed in meandering lines in a
indefinite combinations and forms.
They are imagined as marking stones, points of rest,
as spaces for the entangling lines of strangers and lovers alike.

They create a rhythm that never is the same.


Cut and hill.

The cut and the hill create access to a site formerly closed off by creating a a positive and a negative space,
one for movement the other for sight.
A volcano comes to mind, A fire will be in place.

The hill is formed with all the matter removed by the creation of the passageway through the landfill. It rises equally high above the plateau as the depth of the cut, 14 meters.
Thereby it creates a high point, a point-de-vue from which the
Aare-island, the two river arms the rows of poplar
now revealed in a manner that finds its echo in the vanished gaze of derelict tower
of the Burg Göskon.


Miroir d‘eau.

The miroir d’eau, an artificial lake that visualizes the absent presence of the Ground water, the third river.
It removes the wayfarer out of the landscape guides it down into its belly.
It is an echo chamber, a two way mirror for the nearby cooling tower and its serene presence.
In fifty years it will be the lingering echo of an abandoned future.

It is also built as a swimming lake for the adjacent villages,
open to everyone, the steps leading into the water lend themselves
for rest and contemplation.

The path slowly lowering itself into the ground also rises out and leads the wayfarer back onto continuous horizon line of the channel.