In the countryside (Wietstock)

How is life in the village? What can we learn from the past for the future? And how can a sense of community emerge again? Antje Majewski’s video “Auf dem Land” asks villagers from Wietstock in Western Pomerania about their history and their wishes. A painting shows plants and animals that are important to them. Majewski’s “Animals and Plants from Wietstock” (2021) is a homage to nature and the people of the village. The painting on canvas is dedicated to various animals and plants that are particularly significant for individual members of the village community and were named by the group of clients. Animals and plants typical of Wietstock are depicted, such as cornflowers, buttercups, jasmine, a swallow and a barn owl, as well as a cow. They float in vignettes on a deep blue, abstract background that suggests landscape and sky.
In the video “Auf dem Land (Wietstock)” (2022), the residents of Wietstock themselves tell the history of the village, describe the changes in ownership and the different uses of land: from originally feudal property to the settlement of the village under National Socialism, the arrival of the refugees, who received small farms after 1945, then the communalization of the farms in the LPG, the repossession after reunification, and the takeover of the land by industrial agriculture. At the same time, we follow the transformation of the village from a place where people lived on the land where they also worked and self-sufficiently produced all food, meat, timber, wool and flax, to a place whose inhabitants have very different professions, but hardly work in agriculture anymore. At the same time, many of them pass on the farmer’s knowledge of growing fruit and vegetables and raising chickens and geese in their gardens. How can a new village community develop when people no longer work together, when people live very different, individual lifes? And how do the residents of Wietstock feel about the changes in their connection to the land and landscape around them?

Antje Majewski’s video project was funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media and the Art Fund Foundation as part of NEUSTART KULTUR.

Der künstlerische Projektentwurf von Antje Majewski für die Neuen Auftraggeber von
Wietstock ist im Rahmen des Programms ‚Neue Auftraggeber‘, gefördert von der Kulturstiftung
des Bundes und der Fondation de France, entstanden.Das Mosaik wurde als Projekt von Kunstverein Rügen e.C. durch Stiftung Kunstfonds im Rahmen von NEUSTART KULTUR gefördert.