This secular altarpiece plays with three visions of the Baltic from three different times on three wall panels. It was inspired by the layered history of the Prora seaside resort, from its inception as the star project of the Kraft durch Freude programme to its rebirth as luxury holiday flats. 

The central element is a canvas print of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous 1818 painting, Chalk Cliffs on Rügen. The reproduction on a stretcher-mounted canvas hangs on a wall painted with flake white, also known as white lead, made using a substance extracted from those chalk cliffs. The scene depicts the artist with his wife Caroline and a third individual, possibly an older version of Friedrich. A replica of this painting can be found in one of the apartments of the first hotel to inaugurate Prora’s modern era in 2017. To its left, we see a piece of wall whose cement finish recalls the unrenovated areas of the building, and in its centre an advertisement for the hotel featuring a couple dressed in white and looking to the horizon. To the right, a third wall fragment is covered in a pattern that imitates the wallpaper which once adorned the rooms of the “KdF Seaside Resort for 20,000”, based on an original scrap taken from one of those abandoned apartments. A reproduction of the cover of the magazine Dein Urlaub 1939 [Your Holidays 1939] hangs on the wallpaper: an “Aryan” couple of the Kraft durch Freude programme looking out at the horizon of the Baltic with Prora in the background.

This layering of eras makes us wonder: if totalitarian regimes of the past used slogans to placate the working class with unforgettable holidays, to what extent is the same strategy still employed today?

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© Photographs by Roberto Ruiz. Installation views of the exhibition Aguasvivas. Impulsos eléctricos at Galería Juan Silió.