Felicitas Fäßler
„on uneven ground” (2020/2021)

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The title of Felicitas Fäßler’s artistic project on uneven ground is a proverbial reference to a terrain with imbalances. On a metaphorical level, it can be associated with an unstable situation that holds dangers. Both meanings apply to the starting point of her artistic research: illegal garbage dumps in the area around Berlin. This toxic pollution has effects that are dangerous not just for those who live there but, ultimately, for the entire continent.

One key material that Fäßler has found at the illegal dumps is Styrofoam. This polystyrene is an extruded plastic foam mostly used as an insulation or packing material. It is highly praised by many because it is light, water-resistant, inexpensive to produce, and conducts neither heat nor electricity. Others criticize the fact that Styrofoam is suspected of being a carcinogen and that, although it decomposes, it is not biodegradable. Every one of us has presumably had a chance to admire its resilience at some point: In the sea, abandoned lots, and wherever else the detritus of civilization congregates, chunks of this white foam are almost always to be seen. Fäßler found Styrofoam fragments that had already been colonized by moss. She used insect pins to fix them on a neutral-gray background to present and photograph them. They thus form aesthetically appealing objects that seem virtual, although they are simultaneously also material. They seem placeless as well as rooted. In German slang, “getting mossy” is used as an expression for “becoming old”: Here it alludes to the material’s environmentally devastating resilience. The vegetation envelops the granular pieces, entering into a kind of symbiosis with them. Settlement is what Fäßler calls her objects. In this way, she confronts viewers with a phenomenon that initially strikes them as pleasant and comfortable, but simultaneously illustrates something that is repressed in everyday life and should be extremely unsettling.

Fäßler’s artistic practice is not about naively believing in the adaptability of a glorified Nature and admiring the beauty in this. Instead, she leads us to interrogate inherited ideas, for example, the assumption that we, as human beings, could rule over nature. She also draws attention to something that usually remains invisible and unseen. This becomes emphatically clear in her work Camo—in which she has taken a photograph of an illegal garbage dump overgrown with grass and printed it on camouflage netting. The standard camouflage pattern, which is meant to hide something in a military context, has been replaced by a photographic image that we might also allow to deceive us. The patch of ground we see is not an unmown lawn: It is garbage overgrown with vegetation. This doubled invisibility brings the ignored danger into view.

By contrast, the work Konglomerat (Conglomerate) manifests itself as an idea for reusing discarded materials. At first glance these objects, which were produced by the artist herself, resemble the terrazzo tiles that have been popular since antiquity. Rather than the natural stone typically utilized as an additive to concrete (or lime, in earlier times), the artist’s mixture is two thirds plastic pieces and other small, colorful particles—materials that she also found at the previously mentioned garbage dumps. First poured, then sanded and polished, the result is extremely attractive aesthetically.

The graphic work Imprint presents the 3D image of a car tire. Although it is abstract in its representation, the profile with which it leaves behind direct traces on the driving surface is recognizable. Beyond this, however, car tires also leave other traces or imprints behind. Fäßler has found a great number of them at illegal garbage dumps.

Artistic works like these draw attention to the imprint left on the earth by civilization, whose devastating effects are now palpable. The fact that Fäßler’s objects and images are extremely attractive visually while simultaneously pointing to themes like environmental pollution and the climate crisis is not a contradiction here. Instead, it is precisely this ambivalence that forms the essence of the appeal through which the uneven ground on which our current civilization is built remains present.

Text: Kea Wienand

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About Felicitas Fäßler

Felicitas Fäßler, born in 1989, completed an art degree at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. Using different reproduction techniques, Fäßler questions on what is supposed to be taken for granted, reevaluates it with minimal interventions, and turns securities into doubt.

For more information: Website

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Fresh A.I.R. #4 Online-Showcase

The Online-Showcase offers an opportunity to get an overview of the highly diverse projects of the fourth class of Fresh A.I.R. artists with their different kinds of media and aesthetics.

On view are video and photographic materials about the individual projects, each of which is accompanied by an explanatory text that aims to offer insights into the work’s aesthetic experience.

learn more about the Online-Showcase