A collaboration with Ben Greber, All the Power that Remains focusses on the legacy of highly celebrated and promising, but unsuccessful innovations in high-speed railway transportation. Taking their abandoned test tracks as a point of entrance, the project explores and exploits what physically remains of creativity, faith and determination as powers once pushing these experimental trains.
Procession I
Initially, the idea arose to run a marathon on the decommissioned Transrapid test track, a concrete bridge where trains were tested at speeds of up to 500 kilometers per hour. Another test of speed and efficiency, but now with a human body, the aim of this performance was a brief reactivation of the track, while being at the same time a ritual of sacrifice in honor of the developers’ belief in the Transrapid’s potential.
During an initial meeting with the company managing the test track, it quickly became clear that accessing the concrete bridge was not allowed due to safety regulations. Although this effectively scrapped the original marathon plan, the company suggested using a maintenance vehicle normally used for inspections of the bridge sections.
The result is a ritualistic-looking performance in which this maintenance vehicle spews red smoke across the test track.
Duration 06:51
Cello by Patrick Reerink
From the 1980s until 2011, a consortium of several companies developed the Transrapid as the mobility mode of the future.
