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a 25-year-old Swedish woman named Eija-Riitta Erklöff got married to the Berlin Wall. The ceremony on Groß-Ziethener Straße was witnessed by a small group of friends and was performed with the help of an understanding man who channeled vows on behalf of the wall. As the pioneer of the term ‘Objectum-Sexuality’, Eija-Riitta put a name to her attraction to objects, buildings and structures that she sees as sexual, loving and reciprocal – insofar as all objects are, in her view, sentient beings with souls.
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Written by benandsebastian whilst casting ‘forgotten follies of sølyst’
Article published in kilimanjaro magazine
Issue 12: ‘thinking of collective’
kilimag.com
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a book was published that been defaced, censored and caused fascination ever since. The ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’(The Strife of Love in a Dream) is part love story, part architectural treatise, describing a dream journey in which the main character, Poliphilo, searches for his lost love, Polia, in a woodland landscape populated by distended and mutated classical ruins, hieroglyphs, multilingual messages, futuristic machines, parties, feasts and nubile nymphs.
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Eija-Riitta states that she cannot fully explain the reasons behind her love for her spouse, but that she has identified some sexual characteristics that she finds attractive. On her website she writes: ‘They are rectangular, they have parallel lines, and all of them divide something. That is what physically attracts me’.
Poliphilo has a name that means ‘the lover of many things’. As Liane Lefaivre points out in her book on the Hypnerotomachia, Poliphilo loves: ‘diaphanous garments, precious stones and gems, gold, fine linen, food, chandeliers, sculptures, epigrams, sweet fragrances, ballets, triumphal processions, hieroglyphs, mosaics, antique vases and, last but not least, womens’ shoes.’ Above all though, Poliphilo loves buildings, and his love for them is carnal. Quoting from the Hypnerotomachia, Lefaivre continues: ‘Upon seeing the buildings, Poliphilo feels “extreme delight,” “incredible joy,” “frenetic pleasure and cupidinous frenzy” . The buildings fill him with the “highest carnal pleasure” and with “burning lust”.’
We were going to cast 25 tons of concrete with the occasional help of three unemployed men. The oldest, Arne, whose face was buried invisibly deep under his Viking beard, had cast millions of tons of concrete during the construction of Copenhagen’s metro. Our biggest cast to date was around the size of a shoebox. We presented our offering of plywood formwork to Arne, setting it carefully on the grass before him. Arne breathed out through his nostrils, heavily and slowly.
Eija-Riitta knows the problems of being married to a celebrity. What makes her relationship with the Berlin Wall intimate is that she sees her husband differently from the millions that know the Berlin wall as a universal symbol. By contrast, Eija-Riitta defines her relationship as being grounded on an immediate aesthetic pleasure which is highly personal. As she writes on her website: ‘The purpose of the construction is completely irrelevant to me’.
At home in the village of Linden in Northern Sweden she has lovingly crafted a model of the wall that serves as her memento of their long distance relationship. In Lars Laumann’s documentary on Eija-Riita she is filmed caressing the model at home and taking it with her sledging in the snow in the wooded area around her house.
Poliphilo wanders through the dream landscape of the Hypnerotomachia calculating proportional relationships in buildings, solving riddles, mapping his path, decoding hieroglyphs and translating languages on entablatures. Nevertheless, he seems to know that he won’t ever fully understand the cryptic messages that are being conveyed by architecture along the way. This doesn’t matter, fundamentally, because the more he uncovers, the more aroused he gets. Poliphilo expresses his love through a foreplay of hide and seek with the buildings around him.
‘Architecture resembles a masked figure’, writes Bernard Tschumi in The Pleasure of Architecture. ‘It cannot easily be unveiled. It is always hiding: behind drawstrings, behind words, behind precepts, behind technical constraints. Yet is the very difficulty of uncovering architecture that makes it intensely desirable. This unveiling is part of the pleasure of architecture.’
We had marked out a 10-metre wide circle in a woodland clearing close to Sølyst castle. The first set of formwork stood sturdy, wrapping the concrete cast that now, by the mutual agreement of 5 men who assumed sage faces as they laid hands on the concrete to test its temperature, hardness and texture. We had passed hours in discussion over what release agent should be used to insure that the formwork didn’t become attached to the concrete. We’d driven for miles around remote Zealand, looking for the release agent. Someone had said that vegetable oil was just as good. Someone else had said that vegetable oil might stain the white concrete. I had bought some expensive dermosensitive, organic baby oil as a compromise and had got a kindly look from a pharmacist who assumed I was a caring father. We slowly and carefully unscrewed, unwedged and unclamped the formwork. It slid off to reveal the concrete and we stood back in the woodland, amazed.
Eija-Riitta has a wedding photo showing her resting on the Berlin Wall’s footing, her body bent to create maximum contact with the wall’s surface, her hand outstretched to touch the concrete. Despite living far away from the wall, in Northern Sweden, her relationship is undeniably physical. She writes, in a love poem to the wall: ‘All I want to be is close to you’.
Poliphilo makes love to architecture. Lefaivre points out just how graphic the descriptions of Poliphilo’s lovemaking with architecture are in Hypnerotomachia: ‘In three cases, Poliphilo manages to locate the appropriate orifice through which he can engage in sexual congress with particular buildings. His response, always described at length and in much detail, is sheer coital ecstasy. In one instance the effect on the building is mutual.” […] “the entire structure immediately begins to heave. The floor starts to “move and quake under his knees.” A groaning sound comes from the depths of the structure, “with an incredible rumbling” like “thunder,” which Poliphilo likens to the roar that accompanies the “cracking of ice when it melts, no different than if a huge mountain had fallen into the sea”. The tremors cause the hinges of the doors to shudder.’
We were lent a vibrator. Concrete vibrators ‘consolidate freshly poured concrete so that trapped air and excess water are released and the concrete settles firmly in place in the formwork’, states Wikipedia. The vibrator had a long rounded steel cylinder, of an arm’s length, attached to a rubberised electrical cable. Using the vibrator held the promise of avoiding hours of pumelling the setting concrete with rods – the old fashioned way of making sure that the set concrete isn’t pockmarked with surface blemishes, bug holes and honeycombing. Arne, cigarette in mouth, dangled the vibrator casually into the wet concrete and turned it on. There was chaos. The formwork couldn’t take the high velocity vibrations and broke away from its base. Everyone that had been standing back, smoking, drinking beers and muttering comments sprung into action, rushing in to push, wedge and prop in an attempt to try to get the formwork to hold in place. When the concrete cast finally set there was a beautiful tapering crack running diagonally from its footing up to its midriff.
While we were casting a giant concrete ruin on a moonless night in a floodlit woodland clearing, the world described in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the descriptions of Eija-Riitta’s love for the Berlin Wall no longer seemed so bizarre and remote. Over the last days our rhythm became more and more closely tied to the behaviour of the concrete ruin we were casting. The concrete’s consistency would determine when we could rest – if we dared to err from its own rhythm and rules, there would be serious consequences: it would rupture its formwork if too liquid, it would crumble if too dry, it would change colour and refuse to harden if mixed for too long.
The cement dust dried and blushed our skin and whitened our hair.The cycles of stirring, pouring, and thrusting rods into the concrete began to gnaw on our aching joints. As the giant structure took form in the woods, it blocked our path and forced us into awkward positions, as if it were now dictating the terms of its own construction as we straddled its growing mass. But a bond of mutual dependence had formed, and now there was never for a moment any question in our minds of abandoning the labour of love.
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