Schönholzer Heide is a large public park in the north of Berlin not very known to visitors. Among locals it´s a popular place for recreation because of an adventure playground and a popular café. The project Schönholzer Heide and its Hidden Histories is about a landscape with a multilayered and complicated past. Within the park histories include a mulberry plantation, a health retreat, a castle, a fairground that turned into a nazi labour camp, an open air theatre and an unusual graveyard with dead from various sides of the second world war. These and other histories are well hidden in the park, so that you only find what you are looking for if you know where and how.
Funded by the local arts council of Pankow Berlin, I wanted to show the park in a different light than which the locals are used to seeing it, and remind them of all the interesting and disturbing things that have happened there. I have walked through the park many times without a camera, just looking and opening my mind to what was going on. Literature about the past history of the park did not satisfy my curiosity, so I hired a local amateur historian who had spent his childhood in the park and knew every corner of it. He showed me where to find human remains when the spring comes, where I could potentially dig up old cutlery from the castle, and how to find the hidden entrances to underground war bunkers and where the caste once stood.
I captured items that I hoped would remind people of the past, that I mainly photographed with a large format camera. I like using a large format camera because it forces me to work slowly – and in my view, if you want to get a true sense of a place you can´t do it in a hurry. I collected found items on my walks and used montage to add a farrow wheel (the London Eye) into one of the photographs, showing an open space that used to be the fairground, as well as nazi labour camp. I am currently in the planning stages of creating a zine of the project.
Mari is a Finnish born photographer based in Berlin. She holds a BA in Photography and Human Rights from the University of Roehampton in London, and a MSC in business administration. Her main interests in photography are research based documentaries often including landscapes, architecture, history and theories of place. Apart from her photography work, she regularly engages in community photography and arts projects involving young people. Furthermore, she works in an office supporting the improvement of human rights issues within business. Mari has received funding from various governmental and private arts foundations. Her book Dry the River was shortlisted for the Spine Dummy Award in 2015.