Sven Johne/ Sebastian Orlac, Weiße Gewalt / White Storm (Source Material), 2020

01. Wetterbericht

„Weather Forecast. 29.12.1978.
Blizzard-like snowstorms along the Baltic Sea coast. Over the district of Rostock, cold air from the north stays together with warm layers of air from the south. The temperature differences are more than 20 degrees within a distance of 100 km. At 30 km per second, a strong east wind drives the air masses against each other. Heavy, large-scale snowfalls and severe frost are the result. Especially the island of Rügen is affected by this. Snowdrifts up to 2 meters high make numerous traffic arteries impassable. The bus and train service was stopped around 1 pm. Numerous villages are closed off from the outside world. The energy supply has partially collapsed. The fight against storm and snow has begun.“


This week, Sven Johne presents six videos as a sneak peek into his new work in progress: a work about the snow catastrophe on the island of Rügen which happened in the winter of 1978/1979.

These films are not works of art, but only a filmed collection of the material for a photo-text work I’m currently developing with Sebastian Orlac. The work is about the snow catastrophe on the island of Rügen in 1978/79 — the place where I was living then — and the reflection of this state of emergency today. A contemporary witness tells a child about the crisis and he talks about the “heroism“ of his generation. The core of this work is about „masculinity“ and „defensiveness“ — or rather the tradition of these constructed and questionable self-attributions… The six small videos, however, only show the source materials for the work: a lot of photos from the press published in 1978/79 and the newspaper articles read by the children. It is interesting that we talk about a snow catastrophe in times of global warming. My son at the age of nine has seen the snow only once in Berlin.” — Sven Johne