Jan Lemitz
ensembles + wege durch die stadt

  • Installation

Jan Lemitz uses architecture and infrastructures as points of departure for his artistic-photographic research. Before the background of today’s transformative processes in the urban realm he focuses on the history and planned reconstruction of the former main post office at Düsseldorf’s central station. From 2021 on, the Forum Freies Theater (FFT Düsseldorf) and several other cultural institutions will move into this building.

Designed as the inner-city logistics center of Germany’s federal post, the building already became obsolete shortly after it was finished in the 1990s, mainly because of the post’s privatization and the re-orientation toward the street as the primary route of transportation. The increasing importance of circulating and moving goods has produced a new spatial economy, which not only expands the meaning of routes between periphery and center, but also converts production sites into distribution centers and thus overwrites former constellations. Today, logistic infrastructures have a greater influence on the scenery and cities along the Rhein and Ruhr rivers than the heavy industry that once shaped the region. In its new edition the ancient, several thousand-year old Silk Road that once connected China and Europe finds a new final destination at Duisburg’s port and thus makes—through hierarchical and detailed distribution strategies—its way back into the city and connects global and urban logistics.

In an installation at the HAU2 studio photographic and moving images are used to visualize the complex intertwining of economic, political, and (city)historical circumstances.