ALI(E/A)NSI Conversation Series #7: Sebastian Körbs

Blühende Landschaften

The ALI(E/A)NSI conversation series is part of the exhibition’s curatorial process: a way of connecting with the participating artists through their practices, the works they bring into the exhibition, and their particular memories of and relationships to place.

For the seventh conversation, we speak with Sebastian Körbs about his work Blühende Landschaften. The conversation begins with a phrase that promised prosperity after German reunification, but which later became a bitter and sarcastic description of abandonment across the former East Germany.

Born in Magdeburg in the GDR, Sebastian remembers the industrial ruins of the 1990s not initially as evidence of economic collapse, but as the playgrounds of his childhood. Factories stood empty, windows were broken, and vegetation grew through concrete, masonry and rooftops. Only later did he understand what had disappeared alongside these places: industries, livelihoods, communities and a sense of social continuity.

In Blühende Landschaften, delicate ceramic flowers emerge from this history. Beauty and decay, growth and abandonment, melancholy and transformation exist together within a work whose dimensions recall a grave. Ahead of the exhibition, we spoke about becoming East German in West Germany, the material memory of clay, and how an artwork develops a life of its own when it enters a new place.

---

1. When did the phrase “blühende Landschaften” (“flourishing landscapes”) first enter your consciousness—as a promise, a cliché, a joke or a wound?

I cannot really say when I first became conscious of the phrase. Somehow, I grew up with it. But it only began to play a role when I started reflecting on my East German identity. This happened quite late—only after I began studying in Braunschweig, in West Germany. In a sense, I became East German, or was made into an East German, when I lived in West Germany.

At some point, I began to perceive the phrase “flourishing landscapes” as a form of mockery. As I remember it, my friends who also came from East Germany and I used the phrase sarcastically to describe things that were decaying or no longer functioning—but always within an East German context.

I was born in Magdeburg in 1984, in what was then the GDR. When the political transition happened and Chancellor Helmut Kohl used the phrase in 1990, I had only just turned five. I did not really understand what was happening.

From my childhood perspective, the transformation manifested itself in other ways: little by little, the playgrounds acquired different shapes and bright colours. The small shops where I used to go shopping with my mother suddenly disappeared. Eventually, a supermarket opened, filled with brightly coloured products and ready-made meals. I remember eating my first oven-baked pizza at a friend’s house. We stopped going to the Baltic Sea for four-week camping holidays and began taking canoeing trips in Sweden instead.

2. Is Blühende Landschaften based on a landscape whose transformation you personally witnessed? What disappeared there, and what grew in its place?

During my childhood in the 1990s, factory ruins were everywhere. Nobody took care of the abandoned industrial sites. The fences were full of holes, the doors of the enormous halls stood open and the windows had long since been smashed. These places became our playgrounds.

We explored the buildings, played hide-and-seek and chased one another. Grass, wildflowers, bushes and the first small trees grew through the cracks, across the open spaces, inside the masonry and on the roofs.

I remember climbing an old water tower once. The steps of its metal spiral staircase were rusted, and we had to be careful not to fall through them. When we reached the top, we found a gigantic iron tank that had once held water. Because the roof of the tower was already missing, a small forest had begun growing inside the exposed tank—an ecosystem, a secret and enchanted place.

The aesthetics of decay left a profound impression on me: the eroded concrete surfaces, the smell of dust, oil stains and damp stones, the incredible silence inside those gigantic halls, and the smell of the wild herbs brushing against our calves as we walked across the concrete slabs. All of that shaped me deeply. That was my childhood.

At the time, I did not understand that only a few years earlier these halls had been filled with machinery, or that thousands of workers had produced all kinds of things there in shifts, including ship engines and diesel locomotives.

Nor did I understand what had happened to the people who worked there after the factories were privatised, closed and dismantled. I only learned later that unemployment in Magdeburg had been extremely high—around 20 percent—and that another 20 percent of the population, particularly those with higher levels of education, had left the city.

3. In this work, clay evokes bricks, factories, chimneys and industrial regions. When did material itself become an archive within your artistic practice?

A fundamental principle of my artistic practice is that every work requires its own material. Depending on the context, I therefore work with different materials or genres.

Working with ceramics has played a role in my practice for some time through my engagement with Ottoman ornamentation, although previously in a broader sense. In the SüS Tables, a series for which I construct large tables covered with an Ottoman ornament assembled from thousands of biscuits that are then eaten by the audience, the material ultimately functions in a ceramic way.

The dough from which the biscuits are made behaves similarly to clay. It is soft and malleable. After baking—or firing—it becomes solid. The difference is that a biscuit is made to be eaten. It continues to transform and quite literally passes into its recipient.

Fired clay also becomes solid, but its transformation takes place on other levels: as architecture, as a functional object, as a container, or as a sculpture and representation.

In 2025, I was invited to the 17th International Terracotta Symposium in Eskişehir, a city on the Anatolian plateau. It was there that I worked with clay for the first time and began familiarising myself with the material. During the symposium, among other things, I created a wall relief made from wildflowers.

When I returned to my studio, I wanted to continue exploring the material’s potential. I picked up where I had left off in Eskişehir and began shaping flowers—without any fixed intention and without knowing what the work would eventually become.

This brings me to another principle of my practice: I never begin a new work with an idea or with the intention of making a particular statement. Instead, I begin with a kind of framework. This framework might consist of a two-by-three-metre sheet of paper and an ornamental system. It could also be a proverb and its sentence structure. In the case of Blühende Landschaften, the framework consisted of flowers and clay.

Questions emerge during the working process: What could this become? How does the material behave? Where are its limits? What is my relationship to it? What can be removed? What can be added? What is its relationship to the surrounding space? At what point can the process go no further, meaning that the work is finished?

Through this process, the work gradually becomes more contextualised until it eventually appears as a completed piece.

The finished work then begins telling me something about myself and the world in which I live—something I did not previously know, or at least did not know that I knew.

4. The installation can appear fertile and beautiful even though its growth emerges from economic abandonment. How important is it that viewers first experience attraction before recognising the bitterness of the work?

The poetry of the work lies precisely in the tension between the beauty of the flowers, the delicacy of the ceramics, and the vacancy and decline.

The work is the size of a grave slab. Flowers lie on graves, while bodies decay beneath them. No—they transform. They change, disperse and unravel.

The flowers and plants nourish themselves from the bodies. They form new shoots, blossom and produce seeds. Yet the life once contained within the body is irretrievably lost.

The poetry of Blühende Landschaften resides in the melancholy relationship between life, transformation, death and time.

Neither through feeling nor through reason can we fully grasp what “non-being” means. This produces a vibration within the mind. That vibration is the truly political moment in Blühende Landschaften.

5. What happens when Blühende Landschaften is shown at NOVILLA, within a former industrial area repurposed as a site for art and community? Does the location complicate the work’s pessimism?

First of all, I do not consider the work pessimistic. It is melancholic, and melancholy should not be equated with pessimism.

Of course, the work will be contextualised differently there. But this happens to every work in every space. In an exhibition in Indonesia, the work acquires a different reading than it would in the United States. In the same way, it acquires different contexts depending on whether I show it at NOVILLA or at the Sprengel Museum Hannover.

I think artists should always remain aware of this while also approaching their works with trust and curiosity—allowing them to appear in different forms according to their context.

It is a little like having a child. Of course, you have to accompany it, but it also has a life of its own and will eventually go out into the world. It will change and find its own place within that world.

I find it a wonderful thought that I am able to witness this process and see my works repeatedly appearing in a new light.