With the noisy city in your back, you face the heavy machinery of the harbor. In front of you is a vast body of water.
The ground of the Elbe reveals itself as a realm inaccessible to us, without air to breathe or light to see: what is lost, may never be found again.
Yet, what makes its way to the ground, is absorbed and stored safely in its embrace for eternity. Below the surface, there may lie a shelter where the whispers of the long deceased might be heard, their stories interwoven with the tides.
Trespassing into the ever-moving body of water in the middle of Hamburg is an experimental approach. Can we access the information that is stored on the bottom of the sea?
At the location on Landungsbrücken you will access an artistic intervention, attempting to descend below the surface of water to a constructed story, recorded in a space beyond time.
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On the night from March 11 to March 12, 1822, the Galley “Gottfried" sank during a severe hurricane in the Elbe estuary, close to the sandbanks known as Nordergründe.
En route from Egypt to Hamburg the ship carried various objects in 97 boxes, which Freiherr Menu von Minutoli presumably had either bought in the city Luxor or extracted from graves in the ancient necropolis of Saqqara. While smaller objects were carried to Berlin over land, these heavy parts of the cargo were transported by sea, including the tip of a pyramid, a several-tons-heavy sarcophagus, as well as mummified remains of humans and animals.
Objects with great value for the deceased in the afterlife and of immense worth for the king of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm III. Exhibiting them in the yet-to-be-built museum on what is now called “Museumsinsel” would have gained Berlin a standing to rival the collections in Paris or London.
After the storm, parts of the cargo, including some of the human remains, were discovered ashore. Out of fear, the locals either left them untouched or buried them on the beaches. The boxes were later seized by the authorities and sold at an auction in Hamburg. Most traces of their whereabouts are lost by now.
In 2003, a lock of hair from one of the mummified persons was found in the archives of the MKG in Hamburg.
Yet, the ship and most of its cargo have not been excavated to this day and remain submerged in the waters of Nordergründe.