Berliner Steinwein
The BERLINER STEINWEIN is a telluric brew percolating through the strata of minerals, sand and concretions of bricks that constitute the urban skeleton of Berlin. The Berliner Steinwein reverses the common habit of filtering and distilling, recomposing the fertile impurity of water and its promiscuity with soil, recognising the fellowship of all Berlin water with its ground. The sand of this unfiltering apparatus comes from -30m below the Marx-Engels Forum in Alexanderplatz: the abundant sand on which Berlin stands was sedimented by the melt waters of the last Ice Age. The younger red bricks (just one century old) are of the Sophiensaele building itself. After seeping through the two alembics of bricks and sand, the Berliner Steinwein gets unfiltered and enriched through clay — the catalytic and fertile dust and stealthy sculptural force that also bolsters the foundations of the city. This wine of stones recalls the Arabic word al-kohl that originally meant ‘the finest dust’, the powdery essence sublimated out of a given substance. The Berliner Steinwein is so also a celebration of the global practice of GEOPHAGY (common to Germany and Europe as much as any continent), or earth cannibalism, the consumption of fine silt and clay as a vital nourishment. This geophagic drink reminds that our urban bodies are made of stones, that minerals are alive, that geology is metabolism. To get drunk on earth!
Berlin declaration of the Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism
@ Performance Platform – Body Affects festival
5-8 July 2012, Sophiensaele Berlin
This is an alchemic glyph redesigned and subverted to condense the Berliner Steinwein within the three symbols used, in the ‘pre-scientific’ age, to indicate: water, earth and spirit (or alcohol). www.urbanibalism.net