I took the car from Berlin and drove through Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt towards the Black Forest and Ornamenta, a triennial on art and design. The triennial is situated in part in a museum in Pforzheim, having originally stemmed from the jewellery industry based there.  ‘Originally’ being the apposite word, since a trio of curators, namely Jules van den Langenberg, Katharina Wahl and Willem Schenk, have adopted the radical notion of approaching this edition from an entirely different perspective. Whereas the focal point of the previous edition had been jewellery and the various disciplines jewellery involves, the focal point of this second edition of Ornamenta is the region itself.

As it is, the first edition (in 1989) was also radical in the very sense that it abandoned the local perspective and created space for a modernist perspective, incorporating more universal values, on jewellery, in the first instance. This time around, that perspective has been abandoned, without so much relinquishing the idea of a discipline, next to the idea of a region, a multidisciplinary perspective on culture was adopted. In this edition, art and design have rather become the means to an end, which is the confrontation with the Black Forest region more than anything else.

I’m not necessarily curious about the outcome; what I am looking for is a theoretical framework that will allow one to qualify the regional scope of this project.  I guess this stems from my personal interest in the ‘how’ and ‘why’, rather than the ‘what’. What’s more, I will have the opportunity to speak to the curators themselves, starting with Jules van den Langenberg.

My first stop is Potsdam, where I visit Charlottenhof for the umpteenth time. A farmstead converted into a small palace by the architect Schinkel in Sanssouci park and subjected to an architectural language – architecture parlante – inspired many an exhibition I had the pleasure of creating with Herman Verkerk and the EventArchitectuur agency. While the little palace was never inhabited, together with the surrounding garden it represents the idea of an enlightened kingship. In other words, the building and gardens are a concept, first and foremost. I remain amazed at how Schinkel managed to provide a visual and spatial language for expressing this very ambition.

I leave Potsdam after this visit to continue my journey towards the Black Forest, stopping in Wörlitz to visit a landscape park once established there by order of Prince Franz of Saxony-Anhalt – a park that, like Charlottenhof, represents an idea first and foremost. The ideas of Rousseau and the Enlightenment form the framework for this park and, besides, all manner of structures that were built – temples, a church, a synagogue – were all meant to serve as potential tropes for an as yet unknown future. And they also make clear the relationship between things, the arts, education and the economy. Imagine a network of artistic relationships aimed at an assumed synthesis, rather than a single disciplinary approach. This landscape park has always been open to the public because – in line with the humanising ambitions of the time – this park additionally had to serve as a public book, focused on the relationship between a past and a future, and today it is presented as part of a Garden Kingdom or Realm. ‘Garden Kingdom’ is a word that I interpret as a kind of marketing term and it also includes some parks in the near vicinity, like that of Oranienbaum, nowadays part of the ’ensemble’. Overall, Prince Franz’s ideal was that of the ‘ferme ornée’ – a comic description speaks of an ’embellished agricultural landscape’ – which also drew inspiration from various innovations within agriculture and horticulture, such as types of irrigation. In a landscape park, an example of this would be a fountain that, thanks to various irrigation techniques, can spout water.

I cannot help reflecting on my own attempts at a more integrated way of working for turning a theory into a practice as well. As a director of the cultural organisation Marres in Maastricht, for example, I set up a project office in an attempt to make theory and practice coincide. In this vein, the exhibitions on mostly 19th-century positions such as The Flaneur that were held at Marres were conceived as theory, as a discursive contribution, and several (temporary) initiatives, including the so-called Sphinxpark in the historic city centre, were conceived as practice. When Verkerk and I once visited and studied Wörlitz together with design students from the Design Academy in Eindhoven, the scale of this idealised landscape appeared to generate much disbelief among the students. They seemed to find it too big to have been designed. Indeed, scale of this magnitude is complex. Many artists and designers are therefore somewhat wary of the very concept. Scale, and certainly in a single object, is often taken as a vote for monumentality, which would in turn not do justice to a more human scale. Within this region of the Black Forest, however, the large scale is a given; it is an inescapable factor, not necessarily a choice for all three curators, but something that has certainly been embraced. Suppose we do take this scale as the central starting point for Ornamenta, could this concept and notion possibly provide a framework, far beyond that of the exhibition, for assessing this project? But is my experience as an exhibition maker, even if I rely on the ‘architecture parlante’ as a possible perspective, enough? I have to tame my own doubts and recognize that, in the first instance, I simply need to observe and, yes, possibly this will then lead to some reflections.

I decide to skip Weimar after all, having spent too much time at the Garden Kingdom in Wörlitz. Weimar, like so many other places in Germany, is subject to conflicting emotions. Indeed, this former home of Schiller, of Goethe, of Nietzsche and the first location of Bauhaus is also the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp. With the radical right-wing party AfD recently emerging as the big winner of an election in the state of Thuringia, in which Weimar is located, the debate as to whether history is being repeated in Thuringia has understandably been reignited. 

I drive on towards Pforzheim or rather towards neighbouring town Hirsau, where the impressive ruins of a monastery can be found. The style of the buildings in this former religious centre is one that has influenced the architecture of countless monasteries, even far beyond Germany’s current borders. And this is the very place where Ornamenta’s headquarters are located, in the former home of a doctor and the founder of what is today an enormous psychiatric institution. I see this institution as the bastard child of the ever so popular spa-treatments, which have been practiced for centuries in these green hills of the Black Forest; a practice meant to offer calm and cleanliness for weary minds. Jules opens the imposing door of the physician’s grand villa to let me in. Preferring to get straight to work, he proposes to meet the scion of a business family and director of a company that recycles gold and other precious metals. This woman and her family appear to be long-time supporters of Ornamenta, and she is emphatically enthusiastic about this edition of Ornamenta in particular. Her involvement has been strengthened by the way that Ornamenta’s three curators go about their work, with Katharina Wahl firstly looking at various, more social, projects; Willem Schenk creating the numerous design projects, in many cases in relation to a local producer; and Jules van den Langenberg responsible in turn for the contribution from the arts. This way of working has led, among other things, to an interesting funding model, partly thanks to the fact that many of the producers are local. Financial contributions from various representatives of the business community have not only made the numerous new projects possible, but should also eventually lead to a form of R&D for the region.

Of course, the first thing I ask her about is why she is involved, and, without a trace of doubt, she tells me that Ornamenta’s cultural ambitions enhance her ambitions as an entrepreneur. For example, Ornamenta results in a better business climate, for her employees as well, and in an idea of innovation, which is not immediately appreciated in a stability-oriented community like the one in the Black Forest, but is definitely what a businessperson requires. I am surprised by her unwavering belief in the effects of art and culture, which is possibly even stronger than her belief in this edition of Ornamenta.

After visiting the recycling plant, we travel to one of the more autonomous interventions of this ‘festival’. This is a reinstalled, former swimming pool which has been transformed to make a meaningful contribution to its immediate surroundings as an open, but enclosed, space. For this project is located right next to a construction site earmarked for the region’s largest new housing project. The artist tells us that this work, which can also be understood as a form of re-use, should be seen first and foremost as a spatial intervention. The work initially met with a lot of resistance from people in the surrounding area. Despite its various ambitions, it turned out that the project was permanently perceived as a reused swimming pool, yet not ‘their’ old one. The idea of a spatial intervention was finally accepted only once all of the preparations had been completed and it could be experienced as a whole. Autonomy or not, emotions can have unforeseen effects, and especially within a regional community.

I quiz Jules about the underlying motif of this artistic commission and he refers to acupuncture; he sees this entrenched space as a short burst of pain in the landscape and as a method of evoking something like a lasting memory. He calls it a form of defamiliarisation, understood by me as alienation in the face of the largely over-familiar landscape, which is about to disappear under a layer of new construction. I am again reminded of Wörlitz and wonder if this group of curators’ vision of regionality could be compared to that more historical vision of a landscape park designer. Moreover, Jules refers to several projects as short bursts of pain in the landscape. In the landscape park, it is not the stab of pain but rather the look back that forms what is known as the constituent moment. The aha moment, the moment of recall, which allows you to understand what you have long since seen. And which enables reflection. Is the shot of pain Jules referred to similar to that look back? Besides, you could say that Ornamenta’s scale requires it to be ‘consumable’ only in retrospect. In other words, can the scale of a region be related to the underlying theory of the landscape park? And does the landscape park then provide a theoretical framework from which to approach Ornamenta as a whole?

Ornamenta is indeed exceptionally large, and travelling is a prerequisite for visitors to see and/or experience some of it. That physical confrontation with the region is inescapable, besides which the overall experience is of being scattered – generally speaking, contradictory to the condensed and more reflective experience of a museum visit. Following from this, I then see more and more of the projects as material for a possible analogy to the landscape park, such as the rainbow fountain, which is in Pforzheim itself, or the various newly developed sundials, which hint at an older version of the landscape park.

In writing this article, I would like to contribute to making a start at a possible framework with which to approach precisely the scale of the region, so different from a more traditional museum or exhibition experience. An important aspect of landscape park theory – and certainly that of the Romantic period – is that the physical route and the visual route no longer coincide. Today, one could say that the Romantic landscape park consists only of fragments, mostly without an overarching theme. Indeed, the same applies to Ornamenta, which, thanks to its enormous scale, can by definition only be approached as a series of fragments. Besides the region, the visitor, too, is a subject of Ornamenta, of course. If the full breadth and diversity of Ornamenta is to be considered, the visitor must abandon the classic idea of a curator, narrative or theme because the visitor simply cannot read this project as a whole. The curatorial team seems to have implicitly recognised this fact, as not one but five themes are offered. And the visitor cannot read these five themes as a guide, nor see them as overarching. Precisely because Ornamenta must, by definition, be treated as a collection of fragments, you as a visitor almost necessarily adopt the role of compiler. In other words, the visitor is given the constituent role otherwise reserved for a curator or group of curators. Without overly emphasising the perennial distinction between passive and active, the very role of the visitor as compiler – just as for the hiker in the landscape park – offers unexpected potential, for example, for stringing together the various fragments and arriving at a more individual narrative.

Should this analogy be sufficiently valid, and certainly if we maintain the role of the visitor as compiler, the wish to strengthen the role of a curator also becomes legitimate. This may sound paradoxical, given the scattering effect that Ornamenta has, but beyond notions of theory or practice, passive or active, the curator does, after all, in addition to placing a project in that infinite regional space, also have the opportunity to think about factors such as proximity or distance to what is on display. This could also be the moment when, for example, design in the guise of architecture can make a different, and more direct, contribution to Ornamenta. This is a role that is hardly exploited now and probably deliberately so. I suspect the reason is to be able to weigh each discipline as more or less similar. In my view, however, multidisciplinarity could also be seen as more than the physical presence of multiple disciplines, and rather, for example, as equal but different roles for design and architecture. Moreover, in the future, the difference between indoor and outdoor projects could be further developed, which could lead to the emergence of, for instance, different forms of management and control of the visitor as compiler. In any case, the enormous scale of this region is not a shortcoming of this edition of Ornamenta, but rather a quality. Unlike in a museum or within the scale of a single exhibition, the region therefore offers a spatial fragmentation, so Ornamenta can no longer possibly be read as a whole. I found this fragmentation interesting because it made me feel the need to relate to a project, to a village or a tree, in other words to the network of possible relationships that was offered. And that is precisely where potential for further development of an Ornamenta on this scale lies. One can only hope that the current curators will be able to harness the experience of Ornamenta’s regional scale and use it, for example, for a future edition. After all, a longing for continuity – the future R&D for the region, for example – seems to be implicitly built into the programme.

Guus Beumer

The article ‘Ornamenta, the region and the matter of scale’. by writer and freelance curator Guus Beumer is based on two visits to the northern part of the Black Forest and a visit to the city of Baden-Baden. Among others, the writer spoke to Katharina Wahl, Willem Schenk and Jules van den Langenberg, curators of Ornamenta 2024, and he also met Birgitta Hafner, operator in the recycling of precious metals. And he also spent time with Liz Kruisheer, staff executive for internationalisation of the Creative Industries Fund, Paula Kommoss, former curator of the Freiburg Biennale, Thorben Grobel, artist, Peter Jacobi, president of the Jacobi Stifftung and artist, and Kathrin Luz, freelance press officer. 

This project was supported by: