CAROLINE BRÜNEN

This project views the city as analogous to the human body and it understands the urban space as a living organism that digests. It shows that a key issue of the climate crisis is our detachment from our very own bodies and nature. 

The protagonist of this work is the river Rhine. The photographs show structures that extract the Rhine's bank filtrate, transport it under the city, clean it, and release it back into the river. In Cologne, drinking water is obtained from groundwater, which is also fed by Rhine water. The treated wastewater is released back into the Rhine without removing residues from medications. Due to the ongoing drought, the Rhine is additionally affected by recurring low water levels. Unlike many places in the Global South, in Western culture we view rivers as inanimate objects: Infrastructures that serve a purpose. We thus fail to recognize that they are part of a supra-regional metabolic organism. If we apply this idea to the Rhine, it would be a living organism to which the city of Cologne parasitically docks, extracts, pollutes part of the river water, and then incompletely purifies it in an artificial kidney, the sewage treatment plant, and returns it to the river.

The difficulties in the understanding of the climate crisis are rooted in its invisibility and the time difference between cause and effect. Therefore, the photographs document the infrastructure that are designed to remain invisible while the  texts function as an amplification of the photographs.