2000.05_Common Places: Cultural Identity In The Urban Environment (109.2000), Booklet

Mikael Levin

COMMON PLACES

Cultural Identity

in the Urban Environment

Katrineholm

Cambrai

Erfurt

Thessaloniki

The Untidy Intimacy of Places

by Christopher Phillips

Exhibition Schedule

Insitut Frangais de Thessalonique
In Conjunction with PhotoSynkyria 99
Thessaloniki, Greece
February 16 - March 15,1999

Anglen, Katrineholms Konsthall
Katrineholm, Sweden
June 14 - August 14,1999

Centre Regional de la Photographie

Douchy-les Mines, France

October, 1999

Galerie am Fishmarkt - Konsthalle Erfurt

Erfurt, Germany

2000

Funding and technical support for
this project where provided by Institut
Frangais de Thessalonique, Thuringian
Ministry for Science and Cultural Affairs,
Centre Regional de la Photographie,
and Katrineholms Konsthall.

Special thanks to jacques Soulillou,

Kai Uwe Scheirtz, Pierre Devin, and
Siv Falk. I would also like to thank
Thomas Nicq, Christophe Bavier and
Aurora Hendricks.

Design by Linda Florio

“The house of memory”—this is how the architect Aldo Rossi once described the
Western city. Rossi’s striking phrase prompts us to recall the ways that the forms
and structures of our built environment, as they slowly accumulate over time, come
to provide a guarantee of a living connection between past and future generations.
Seen in this light, the city can be imagined as a space whose true function is to
enable individual and collective memory to coexist. In our century, however, the
cultural value of memory has been increasingly challenged; as times change and
circumstances shift, the contending claims of the past, present and future are being
constantly renegotiated.

These are some of the considerations that underlie Mikael Levin’s photographic project
“Common Places,” which takes as its subject a relatively unheralded aspect of urban
Europe: its towns and smaller cities. In four locales ranging from Scandinavia to the
Mediterranean —Katrineholm (Sweden), Erfurt (Germany), Cambrai (France) and
Thessaloniki (Greece) —Levin introduces us to a distinctive urban culture marked
by a singular array of pleasures and tensions. The pleasures spring first from the
preservation of a human-scale architecture that avoids the typical big-city imbalance
between the human body and the massive built environment; then from the survival
of a casual street life that encourages pedestrians to linger in public spaces, fostering
an air of easy face-to-face encounter; and finally from a sense of coexistence with, not
detachment from, surrounding nature. The tensions arise from the pressure to create
a sustainable local identity in a Europe that is growing both increasingly unified and
culturally homogenized. In “Common Places” we are presented with four distinctive
yet not untypical communities, each responding in its own fashion to the challenge of
creating a shared sense of place. Through the photographs of Mikael Levin we gain a
new insight into seemingly unremarkable urban spaces, which we learn to recognize
as the setting for a quiet battle that pits the relentless forces of the present against
the stubborn traces of the historical past.

“Common Places” extends, in an unexpected direction, the concerns of Mikael Levin’s
previous projects, which have frequently explored the dialectic of rootedness and
exile. After landscape photographs carried out largely in France, Sweden and Israel
during the 1980s, his “Border Project” of 1993-95 encompassed several interrelated
bodies of work. One consisted of laconic studies of the now-abandoned border
stations found along the boundaries of the French hexagon; these architectural
structures, which once symbolized a whole national ethos of belonging and exclusion,
have now become obsolete with the dismantling of internal borders within the
European Union. Another presented rather anonymous-looking photographs of people
moving confusedly through the terminals at Orly airport in Paris—a crucial transit
point for arriving immigrants—and a third comprised portraits made in Sweden of war
refugees who had fled the Balkan conflicts.

In his next project, “War Story” (1995-96), Levin retraced the path that took his father,
an American war correspondent, through the battlefields and concentration camps
of France, Germany and Czechoslovakia at the close of World War II. Alongside text
panels bearing excerpts from his father’s writings. Levin showed his own quiet,
observant contemporary photographs, often made at the same sites. From their juxta¬
position emerges an overlay of historical moments, one that prompts the viewer to
search for subtle traces of the past in the apparently banal scenes of the present.
Subsequently, in a 1998 project tellingly titled “The Burden of Identity,” Levin carried
out a series of portraits of the contemporary lews of Berlin —men and women who are
slowly rebuilding a community all but extinguished during the Third Reich. These
portraits gain part of their intensity from the fact that they were made at a variety of
different sites in a city whose urban fabric is now being irrevocably transformed.

It is possible to discover a cluster of related themes in Levin’s earlier projects. These
include the fragility of human communities; the ways that inhabited spaces preserve
or conceal traces of the past; and the difficulty, during an era of violent flux such as
ours, of understanding who one is and where one comes from. From such concerns
arose the questions that led Levin to conceive “Common Places.” He writes, “When I
was photographing ‘War Story,’ especially in the cities, I was noticing how the impact
of the war was often expressed more in the absence of things than anything else.”

As a result, he says, “I now wanted to try to work with more subtle traces, to show
how everyday scenes in themselves express memory and identity.”

“Common Places” acquired a specific shape in response to Levin’s growing interest in
a certain kind of urban European community, that found not in the great metropoles
but in towns and smaller cities. His aim, he says, was not to carry out an exhaustive
documentation of the four places he selected, or even to convey a rounded portrait
of each. Instead he set out to suggest, through a carefully edited group of eight
photographs of each locale, both the “typical” qualities they share and the particular
features that set them apart.

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Levin approached “Common Places” not analytically, as an urban sociologist might,
but intuitively, as a visual artist. As the project developed, he hit upon ways to make
visually manifest the correspondences he sensed between the four locales. Working
primarily around the central urban district in each city, he looked primarily for “every¬
day” sites: the kinds of places that a local resident might regularly pass along a per¬
sonal promenade. At the same time, Levin purposely avoided recognized landmarks
(“postcard views” of Katrineholm are represented in the exhibition by the actual
postcards he collected). Searching for settings that suggest what Aldo Rossi has
called “the untidy intimacy of places,” he concentrated on the kinds of scenes that
furnish the familiar, unremarked backdrop of a community’s collective life.

In deciding upon his camera viewpoints, Levin chose to keep to a middle distance,
avoiding both extreme long views as well as close-ups of individual details. He sought
to register in each image as much mundane information as possible—for example,
the varieties of clothing worn by people in the streets —knowing that such particulars,
while of scant importance today, often become a source of fascination with the
passage of time. To retain a sense of the specific atmosphere and quality of light in
each locale, he varied his printing method slightly for each group of prints. And, to
encourage the viewer to become visually immersed in the scenes that he presents,
he decided to make the prints in a comparatively large format.

In the end Levin chose to concentrate on four places that he had encountered more
or less by accident during his travels in recent years. Katrineholm is a town of around
21,000 people that lies just over 100 kilometers southwest of Stockholm. Cambrai, a
modest city of roughly 175,000, is situated in northern France, not far from Lille. Erfurt
is located in central Germany, approximately 100 kilometers southwest of Leipzig, and
counts around 220,000 inhabitants. Thessalonki, a port bordering the waters of the
Aegean, is the principal city of northern Greece, with a population of around one mil¬
lion. In addition to their variations of size and geographical location, these four urban
sites also differ significantly—and here is perhaps the real key to Levin’s project—in
the ways that the past impinges on the consciousness of present-day inhabitants.

Katrineholm is a town whose roots do not go deep. Although 6,000 years ago a Stone
Age hunting and farming culture existed in this area, Katrineholm is a new town, a
garden city officially founded in 1917. It is located in a predominantly farming region
that is also home to light manufacturing operations and high-tech companies. Above
all there is an attempt here, characteristic of the turn-of-the-century garden-city
movement, to achieve a balance between economic and environmental concerns,
between work and leisure activities. Yet despite its seeming isolation, this is also
a town in which foreigners have grown to be a familiar presence, a result of the
Swedish government’s policy of directing to Katrineholm many immigrants—
Vietnamese, Kurds, Cambodians, Africans—who have come in search of temporary
work or political asylum. Focused almost entirely on the present, Katrineholm has
only lately begun to preserve “historic” buildings erected at the turn of the century.
Recently, too, the downtown streets have been paved with cobblestones—which
never existed before. It is as if a sense of tradition is something that must be
artificially cultivated or be imported from elsewhere.

Levin’s photographs evoke a town that still seems rather precariously cleared from the
surrounding countryside. In one photograph green nature looms in the distance past
a row of houses, and in another we see low, wild shrubbery unobtrusively edging past
the outer boundaries of a parking lot. Katrineholm’s solidly constructed buildings are
rather nondescript; their unblemished, unornamented facades lend them the air of
oversized architectural models. This flawless quality renders almost shocking the
one instance of graffiti that we see. Street lights and traffic signs are anonymously
modern; and only the sprinkling of satellite TV dishes on rooftops speaks of a direct
connection to the outside world. This is a town which, undistracted by relics of former
triumphs or tragedies, seems determined to hold on to its stasis.

The past intrudes more forcefully on Cambrai, but it seems to offer few unambiguous
messages to the city’s contemporary inhabitants. Once the capital of a Roman province,
Cambrai flourished during the Middle Ages as a commercial city on the trade routes
linking England, Flanders and Champagne. Like much of northern France, Cambrai was
devastated during World War I (the first modern tank battle was fought nearby), and
the city was deliberately rebuilt on the lines of the original street plan. A handful of
architectural monuments have survived from the i6th-i8th centuries, but these are of
insufficient grandeur to turn the city into a tourist destination. As is the case throughout
this region, Cambrai’s once-vital textile and manufacturing industries have fallen on hard
times, and it is too early to predict the outcome of current efforts to forge new economic
partnerships with neighboring areas in Belgium, Holland and Germany.

Levin shows a small city of modest, comfortable aspect, whose three- and four-story
buildings are fronted by unassuming facades of brick, stone and stucco. Within
Cambrai’s almost seamless blend of architectural styles, the more distinctive struc¬
tures, such as the 16th-century Maison Espagnole and the restored Hotel de Ville,
do not stand out dramatically from the prevailing urban mix. They are jostled by
their neighbors—more recent, anonymous buildings whose roofs bristle with TV
antennae—and by the ubiquitous parked autos which seem to crowd every sidewalk.
Levin’s photographs present striking evidence of the congestion that threatens many

European urban centers, whose narrow, winding streets, fundamentally unaltered in
plan since the Middle Ages, were never meant to handle high-volume auto traffic. A
moment of visual relief, at any rate, is provided by a long perspectival view that looks
past a vista of residential blocks toward a reassuring terminus—a stand of trees that
appears to signal the boundaries the old city.

Erfurt, too, has inherited a classic, concentric city plan, but it has dealt with the prob¬
lem of circulation by turning the old city center into a pedestrian zone—one aspect
of an effort to parlay Erfurt’s rich medieval heritage into a major touristic attraction.
For centuries a prosperous trading town, Erfurt boasts a collection of splendid Gothic,
Baroque and Rococo buildings as well as the university where Martin Luther studied.
The expansive cathedral square, the Domplatz, is ringed by historic houses with
half-timber facades; from it fans out a network of narrow streets. The survival of the
old city owes more to luck than foresight. Erfurt escaped the Allied aerial bombing
of World War II relatively unscathed; subsequently, during the 50 years of the socialist
German Democratic Republic, little renovation was attempted, and new building
activity was confined to the satellite zones beyond the old city.

In his photographs of Erfurt, Levin presents us with only indirect glimpses of the
restored Domplatz, as when we catch sight of soaring steeples through the trees of
quiet residential streets. The new construction undertaken since 1990 seems for the
most part tastefully done, with even the modern apartment buildings blending in
more or less harmoniously. Yet the 20th century cannot be held fully at bay: consider
the evidence of a graffiti sprayer’s recent visit on the ground-floor walls of an impos¬
ing building with rusticated timbering.

Whether consciously intended or not, the restoration of medieval Erfurt as a kind
of Disneyesque fantasy has the effect of throwing into obscurity the more doubtful
aspects of the city’s past. During the Third Reich, for example, Erfurt was home to one
of Germany’s largest military garrisons and witnessed the wholesale deportation of
the city’s Jewish population; its factories manufactured the gas ovens that were put to
deadly use at Nazi extermination camps. Reminders of Erfurt’s half-century of socialist
rule seem no more likely to survive. In addition to his photographs of the central city,
Levin visited the monolithic residential high-rises built during the socialist era. These
buildings once stood as symbols of an alternative vision of the future—a vision that,
now discredited, is being erased from Erfurt’s collective memory. While still maintained,
the 10-story slabs are filled largely today with the families of aging, unemployed
workers who have proved unable to find a place in the new free-market economy.

In contrast to Erfurt’s selective memory, Thessaloniki offers an example of a modern
urban environment built on the wholesale repudiation of the historical past. Founded
more than 20 centuries ago, Thessaloniki flourished under the Romans and became
the second city of Byzantine empire. Conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1430, it
remained under Ottoman rule until taken by Greek forces in 1912. Only five years later,
in August 1917, a devastating fire swept through through the city, destroying virtually
all of the old urban center. Thessaloniki’s political leaders seized the opportunity
to totally recast the city plan; in so doing, the architectural heritage of Rome and
Byzantium was highlighted and the memory of the Ottoman period was expunged.

A French architect was commissioned to draw up a modern grid of streets cut by
diagonal thoroughfares, and the old city dwelling pattern, based on the existence of
distinct ethnic quarters (Greek, Jewish, Muslim) gave way to new neighborhoods
based on economic stratification.

Of the four locales that Levin photographed for “Common Places,” Thessaloniki marks
the point where a sense of modern big-city life enters the scene. We see wide boule¬
vards flanked by recent 8-story residential buildings that overwhelm the remnants of
Byzantine churches, and a waterfront packed with high-rise structures. We encounter
the big city’s familiar whirlwind of visual information: street signs, commercial bill¬
boards, dense forests of TV antennae, and a jumble of modern architectural styles.

The distinctive features of Mediterranean culture, too, become evident here: almost
every residential building features generous, sun-drenched balconies, suggesting an
easy openness to the environment. Surprisingly, in a city laid out with the automobile
in mind, a flourishing public life survives on the streets, making Thessaloniki seem an
enormous small town rather than an impersonal metropolis.

With tact and subtlety, Mikael Levin’s photographs of Katrineholm, Cambrai, Erfurt and
Thessaloniki reveal the deep-seated strengths and surprising vulnerabilities of urban
communities as they struggle to reconcile the inheritance of the past and the insistent
demands of the present. His images pass no judgments. Richly descriptive rather than
prescriptive, they advance no easy solutions. Instead these photographs enable us to
take a crucial first step, one that brings us closer to comprehending the urban processes
that slowly unfold, in all their human and historical complexity, before our eyes.

Christopher Phillips is senior editor at Art in America magazine. He teaches at
New York University’s Tisch School of Arts and at the School of Visual Arts.

Katrineholm

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Katrineholm, founded in
1917, is a town that lives
in the present, without a
past and without any
great interest in its lack
of one. Built as a railway
junction and designed
as a “garden city”, it
represents the ideals of
the modernist movement
and the best aspirations
of social planning. In
recent years Katrineholm
has seen a major influx of
immigrants, refugees from
conflicts the world over.

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Cambrai has a history of
over 2,000 years. Yet it
too, like Katrineholm,
seems to live very much
in the present, not having
resorted to any self-con¬
scious preoccupations
with historical structures.
It is a city layered with
successive urban designs,
rebuilt after war time
and again. Today Cambrai
searches to redefine itself
as a regional center in
a part of France that has
experienced severe
economic decline.

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The city of Erfurt revels
in an idealized past, as
expressed in its unique
medieval center. Here
one finds an untainted
Germany, a Germany
from before the horrors
its modern era.
Surrounding the historic
center, however, this
century’s expansion
festers, presenting all of
the social and economic
problems carried over
from the Communist
era to the united Germany
of today.

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Thessaloniki

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Thessaloniki is remark¬
able for its denial of
history, trying as it does
to erase 500 years of
foreign rule. The city, once
a rich multi-ethnic center
of trade and culture, was
largely destroyed by fire
in 1917. Rebuilt starting
in the ‘20s, it was laid
out on a modern grid
that preserved only its
ancient landmarks, and
its Ottoman past was
completely obliterated.
While Thessaloniki has
expanded greatly in
modern times, it never
recovered its wealth or
diversity.

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tin iuai

Mikael Levin’s photographs often focus on questions of
identity and memory in the landscape. Projects include
Silent Passage, a study of an isolated lake in Sweden
(published in 1985 by Hudson Hills Press, New York),

Les Quatre Saisons du Territoire (1987 -1990), a survey of
changing land use in western France, and Borders (1993).
about the evolving notions of borders in today’s Europe.

In War Story (1995), he retraced his father’s 1945 journey
through war-torn Europe, photographing the places described
by his father as a journalist fifty years earlier (published
by Gina Kehayoff Verlag, Munich, 1997)- Mikael Levin has
exhibited widely and his work is included in many public
collections, including, in New York, the Whitney Museum
of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Bibliotheque de
rationale de France (Paris) and Moderna Museet (Stockholm).
Mikael Levin was born in New York City and lives there
today. He has also lived at various times in Israel, in France,
and in Sweden.

Common Places looks at how
four western European cities
express their cultural identities.
It is about the origins and
history manifested in ordinary
urban spaces, and how
these manifestations reflect
contemporary attitudes toward
the past and the future.

Ranging in size from small
town to large city, these

geographically diverse places

are typical urban centers of
today. And while they each
have a distinctive history,
this century’s cultural and
economic cross-influences
have steadily brought them
closer to one another.

Your comments on this project are welcome. Please
contact Mikael Levin through any of these exhibition
sites, or by e-mail at: complaces@aol.com