Over the course of several years, the design studio anima ona artistically explored the large-scale construction site Stuttgart 21 as a place of transformation. In the project titled Archaeology of a City Mine, the area surrounding the main train station was transformed into an archaeological excavation site.

In this work, anima ona assumed the role of excavators. In various ways, they made visible the diverse material and metaphorical layers of the construction pit.

The activity on the construction site was documented through photography; artifacts were collected, archived, and examined for their aesthetic and functional characteristics. In a continuous search for previously untapped resources and possibilities for reuse, they processed the discovered relics through a kind of modern palimpsest process*, thereby assigning them new value and different meanings.

Inside the exhibition space kunst [ ] klima, a walk-in room-within-a-room is on display. It presents a digital archive of the artifacts, along with video films that illustrate the site’s transformation processes. In addition, soil from the S21 construction site is distributed throughout the space.

An accompanying publication documents the collection of the various media related to the construction process from autumn 2019 to spring 2022.

The publication is available for purchase through the kunst [ ] klima project space.

Participating designers: Concept, Objects, Earth Room: anima ona (Freia Achenbach & June Fábregas)
Digital Archive: Tamara Wirth, Niklas Berlec, Valentin Alisch, Tobias Hönow
Videos: Tamara Wirth
Publication: Tamara Wirth, Niklas Berlec, Valentin Alisch, Tobias Hönow

Photo Credits: Ulrike Reichart, 2022