The Rainmakers

2016

Documentation
exhibition
“examples to follow! expeditions in aesthetics and sustainability”
http://www.z-n-e.info/?root=2&sub=1&kat=12&id=351&lang=en
Artistic director: Adrienne Goehler
Church Bröllin, Germany 2016

3-channel video installation
with 3 projectors, 3 mediaplayers, 3 loudspeakers
4:37 min., sound
Camera: Maria Vedder
Edit: Maria Vedder, Manja Ebert
Animation: Marina Schnider
Sound: Maria Vedder
Thanks to: Susanne Ebert, Steve Müller

A medieval church in North Germany provides the input for this work about finiteness. The defining element for the video installation is a circle. In christianity and many other religions this line without a start or end stands for finiteness.

On my flight from New York to San Franscico I took some pictures of the huge circle formations in the Middle West. To me they seemed a divine or extraterrestrial message. Later I learnt that they had been written into the landscape through circle irrigation. The water in Kansas comes from a ground water reservoir from the ice age. The rivers that used to be fed have long time ago run dry. This fossil water will be used up in a not far away future. Even below Saudi-Arabia are water resources from the ice age which have been channeled through circle irrigation into the fields. These also will be used up in the coming decades.

Agribusiness has turn the original circle symbolism into the contrary.

In the films the circles have been set into motion through a digital intervention putting in contrast pictures of rain and overhead sprinkling system in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. THE RAINMAKERS is – like the Installation SUSURRUS – part of a worldwide survey of industrial interventions in nature and landscape.