Documentation of the exhibition at the law firm White & Case Berlin as part of the video art series AUF ZEIT

Work in progress since 2016
Multi-channel video installation, installation dimensions variable
Camera: Maria Vedder
Editing: Till Beckmann, Manja Ebert, Maria Vedder
Animation: Till Beckmann, Marina Schnider
Sound: Maria Vedder
Color Grading: Till Beckmann

When rain was scarce, shamans and later scientists came up with crazy ideas in the hope of luring it down from above. Today, water also comes from deep below; it is no longer conjured up from the sky – which, when viewed from above, looks like it was divinely formed or like extraterrestrial messages. We are talking about the circular, green fields of so-called center pivot systems, which are part of the automated irrigation systems often found in arid and desert regions. The water they extract often comes from glacial groundwater reservoirs fed by rivers that dried up long ago. Pumped up from the depths, once this fossil resource has been depleted it is gone forever, due to the idea of eternal economic growth, a concept which is supposed to make deserts bloom, but at the same time exploits nature and permanently destroys the very basis for life in such places.
Maria Vedder saw fields like these on a flight over the arid Midwest of the USA. She was fascinated by their paradoxical beauty, the precise geometry of the agricultural plots, of a kind which does not occur that way in nature and which informed her video work “Die Regenmacher” (The Rainmakers). The aerial photography in the work shows the green circles beginning to turn like cogwheels. Digitally animated, they rotate around their own axis, geometrically abstract, unnaturally circular. This artificial movement illustrates the contradictory artificiality of this kind of agricultural cultivation: “Die Regenmacher” does not show a natural cycle, but symbolizes a dystopian future spinning in circles—a future unable to develop differently because we humans of today are “cutting off our own water supply” for our food.
Without the rain sounds added by Vedder, the agricultural surfaces that we can see could as well be bacterial cultures or UFOs. On the other hand, their shape also evokes associations with coins, and as we know the term “rainmaker” also has another meaning—as a metaphor, it stands for lawyers and businesspeople who generate growth and profit and are instrumental in bringing in new business and clients or capital. Instead of water, these rainmakers make money rain down. Shown here, the title of Vedder’s work is thus also an ironic reference to the exhibition venue—a commercial law firm.
Text: Stephanie Kloss