Lost Places: Rails tell

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A bright birch grove and a disused railway site somewhere in Chemnitz – in 2021 , this was the place where we from Fraktalwerk took the risk of doing our own thing and working together in four performances.

Three-and-a-half years later, a new project has emerged. “Schienen erzählen” (Rails telling stories) is a new contibution to the long-running project “Lost Places.” 

© Fraktalwerk (Sorry, German language only, Translation of the reading below)

Sitting on the disused railway tracks, the narrator, Marlen Wagner, listens to the stories they are telling. Suddenly, a phone rings and a voice invites her to tell the rails a story – the story of the Tremayne family’s gardens in Cornwall. Lost, resurrected and reawakened as the “Lost Gardens of Heligan.” A shifting story that the rails now carry out and those who know how to listen can hear …

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Translation of the reading

I just got a phone call and there was a voice telling me to tell a story that is carried on by these disused tracks.

In England, in the far south-west, in Cornwall, there lies a garden. This garden was owned for centuries by the Tremayne family.

In 1914 everything changed. In 1914, all 22 gardeners went off together to fight in the First World War for whatever, and none came back. The family lost because of what happened a lot of money. They kept their property, but could no longer – cultivate the garden. There were no more gardeners either. It was not only these gardeners who did not return. So the garden decayed, wild rhododendrons grew into the sky – and it became a jungle. The garden was abandoned, the house sold.

Many many years later, in the 1980s, a descendant of the family came back and thought the garden deserved a second chance. He didn’t talk about the house. He came with a friend, a musician, and together they both looked for – garden architects with whom they could – redo the garden, which consisted of manymany smaller gardens.

And indeed, ten years later, these gardens were reopened – and they were given the name “The Lost Gardens of Heligan”. – At the moment of their revival or their reopening, they were called the lost ones.

These gardens, by their name, are a constant reminder – of what was, of what was lost, of what could be resurrected, and of what will remain. At least that is what everyone thought.

In 2020, during the first lockdown, all gardeners were dismissed, the gardens gates closed and again nature made its space and overgrew beds, trees even the rhododendron grew up again very quickly.

And again the gardeners went to war, only this time against bureaucracy, ignorance, laws. And they won. Three months later, they were back in their gardens. As volunteers of a project that primarily restored the vegetable beds and distributed the harvested vegetables to needy families in the area. Of course, they also took care of the entire garden. Gardeners are just like that.

In 2021, in the second lockdown, there was only three months of closure. And then everything was reopened. And since then the gardens have been running. And visitors come and enjoy them and we all hope that it will be forever.

Because lost places carry something in them that brings them back to life again and again. It is not necessarily the same as it was before, but it is always the chance of something new. So the Lost Gardens of Heligan always remind us of what has been, what was lost, what will be, and what is right now. For it is in this moment that we live.

Even at a time when talking about trees is almost a crime because it involves keeping silent about so many misdeeds. But it is our time, our moment. And we are living in this very moment.

Marlen Wagner