Patricia Sandonis

The Berlin Circle (or Art Made by Walking in City Parks), 2012

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Patricia Sandonis photography showing a mountain landscape made with green plastic remnants
01 Digital photograph. Green plastic waste found in city parks

There was a mint candy wrapper on the grass in a park.
Green on green. A contemporary Malevich.
Without that wrapper, I would feel very alone. It would feel like being the first person to set foot somewhere.

Trash humanizes the landscape. Berlin’s parks are littered with trash, so no one feels the loneliness that comes with living in a big city. I could collect flowers or find stones with crazy shapes, but instead, I collect trash found in city parks and imagine who was there before me.

Photography of a found green object on the grass of a park
02 Plastic object found on the ground in a park in Berlin
Patricia Sandonis artistic installation of green plastic garbage and remnants
03 Collection of green waste found in parks and gardens
Patricia Sandonis art installation called The Berlin Circle, showing a circle of green plastic remnants, a green light installation and a series of photographs
04 Installation view at Teatro Calderón, Valladolid, Spain
Photography of a found green plastic toy hidden between plants
05 Plastic object camouflaged among the leaves on the ground in a Berlin park
Patricia Sandonis green art light installation
06 Detail from the green-bulbed string of lights

In 1967, Richard Long produced “A line made by walking” over the grass in a landscape, one of his first contributions to the land art movement – an ecological-critical reaction to commercialization. ‘My art is in the nature of things’ says Long. Later, in 2011, the Nationalgalerie at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin exhibited a work by Richard Long titled “The Berlin Circle”, which invited people in Berlin to walk in a circle around it.

This Berlin circle is a visual quote of Long’s “Berlin Circle” and questions the meaning of culture-nature in Berlin. In Germany, the definition of nature has included the word “culture” since the ‘70s.
Green objects found in city parks form the circle. These objects were camouflaged in the park and remind us of the people inhabiting those parks, in contrast to the uninhabited and isolated pure nature of Long’s installations.

Recently, there has been political discussion regarding the accumulation of plastic material. The possibility of transforming Urban Solid Waste into energy through combustion has been raised. This would cause even more CO2 than the natural transformation process of USR. An appropriate solution to the USR problem has not yet been found, and some countries pay to shift the problem away from themselves by sending their USR to be buried in other countries. The natural process of USR’s transformation into organic material is very slow and, in some cases, is comparable to the amount of time needed for a stone to become sand.