Outside the fence, people run, walk, amble and swim by. Boats pass. Music plays. Occasionally someone stops to peer through the fence, curious.
On the fence, there are banners and signs of various ages, announcing the future of the Spreepark within and warning trespassers to keep out. Layers of graffiti accumulate on this signage almost as quickly as the foliage grows on, around and through the fence.
Animals and sometimes people pass under, over and through the fence.
Inside the fence, a magical world awaits. Largely silent when the construction pauses, yet thrumming with life. Alongside the construction site, plants, animals and insects flourish in and around the remnants of the amusement park rides: mechanical relics slumbering in a state of suspended animation, themselves latent and layered with histories as tangled as the vegetation that grows through them... we hear tales of intrigue, politics, economics, family tragedy, speculation, imagination, that get overlaid on other stories and experiences of the park — past, present and future.
Everyone, it seems has a story about this place...
We visit the site when work on the construction site pauses: early in the morning, late in the evening and on weekends.
The light is magical at these times, probing deep into the forest, illuminating individual strands of foliage, occasionally glinting on the metal structure of the fence and the rides, gently revealing these rigid structures amongst the lush vegetation. It dazzles as it reflects off the swathes of cleared earth and piles of rubble of the construction site.
Inside the fence, time seems to stand still... yet the site is different each time we visit — new clearings, new piles, fresh machinery tracks... As we walk around, we piece together the changes that are unfolding in the present while weaving together myths and stories from the past and debating and imagining the proposed, potential and possible futures of the world inside the fence.
These stories we tell ourselves are a form of temporary ownership — we seek to make sense of, to construct the past and to project the future of the Spreepark, possessing it for this short time.
But ultimately one can never fully know the past, ownership itself is a myth and it is futile to predict the future.
What follows here are moments in time, one more story to add to the many.
