Exercise to Exercise

In ‘Exercise to Exercise’, I engage with the militarized landscape of a former NVA border barracks through a temporary weaving intervention. For years, I found myself unable to pursue my initial plan to work with weavings in this area, as its military past acted as a mental blockade. The woods are traversed by trenches and pits that, according to my research, were used for military exercises during the Cold War. Now, I primarily perceive the nature that is overgrowing these traces. In March 2026, I wove a 20-meter-long, 5-centimeter-wide strip of red paper into trees growing in a circle around one of the pits. The action was photographed from five different angles and I had prints made. In reference to the round shape of the pit, the circular array of the trees, and the uncertainty regarding the type of maneuver carried out in this particular pit, I cut a circle out of the photograph. For the position of the circular cut-out, I chose a densely woven section in the motif and subsequently reinserted what I had removed, rotating it. The weaving is thus amplified by an element of the unreal.