Sensing Sound in Literature-Talents

The Travertinpark’s eponymous sediments predate humans and, therefore, history by myriads of years. Yet, even in the absence of culture, nature has found its own ways of becoming the historian, preserving tales and remains of prehistoric flora and fauna until human accounts incorporated these archival shards into their own timeline. These shards prove the flourishing and recurring relevance of this location long before parks, forts, or quarries began to lean on the space of today’s park and invite stories and thought experiments not just about the absence of human intervention, but about a space assembling, breathing, and breaking – creating an ecological “I” where more conventional storytellers are absent – according to its own rules that are seemingly more endurant and resilient than the many stories we have later layered on top.

The spaces of and adjacent to the Travertinpark have first undergone human re-sculpturing in antiquity as part of the outermost reaches of the Roman empire, establishing both military and – outlasting the former by centuries – civilian settlements. While many walks of life, including our prehistoric ancestors, had already utilized these grounds, antiquity marks a human arrival that not only fundamentally reshaped the appearance of this space beyond what nature had previously drawn up, but also sees a collective ‘claiming’ this space as their own, both attempting to exert control over it and establishing an irreversible link of reciprocal belonging and importance that formally demarcates the prehistoric shaping of this space from a fickle and rapidly evolving human history that has been unfolding and can be retraced since.

While human development – and thereby, history – has continually sped up correlative to our technological expertise, it was not until, considering the timescale of this park’s history, yesterday that this technological, auditory, social, and historic silence has been broken. In the 19th century, the here examined space has given way to train tracks, manufactories, and production plants that, while only very few remain, have left their scars in the now renaturalized skin of the park. That is, sudden changes in vegetation or unnatural and brittle rock ledges make unseen stories of exploitation – both human and nature – visible and invite an exploration of a modernity gone by, of a stepping stone in our past that has fallen into disrepair. This ‘chapter,’ maybe more so than others, challenges the link between remembrance and reparation and makes for an excellent window into the many parallel pasts of the park.

If Roman fortifications have left imprints in the skin of the Travertinpark and Württembergian train tracks added scars and bruises, the gaping wounds arrived alongside the quarries of the 20th century intent on harvesting and commercializing the unusual and resilient rock – travertine – that had been a dormant fundament for half a million years. While this epoch certainly marks an escalation in the re-sculpturing of the park’s space, it also sees its history take on a global scale: The rock is exported and incorporated into buildings across Germany, but in select cases even made it as far as the Netherlands or Argentina, carrying its historical imprints across many borders and linking distant spaces to a very local history. Thus, both the still visible absence of travertine as well its displaced present otherwhere become contact points for stories inexorably linked to the rich past and present of the Travertinpark.

Alongside the many layers and indices of the park’s past, a rather paradoxical sight can be encountered not far from it: Surrounded on most sides by the steel coffin of a power plant serving a sizeable portion of Stuttgart, a road rushes past an array of 14 travertine pillars, each of them 15 meters in height and 90 tons in weight. Nazi architects had intended for this neoclassical piece of architecture to be moved to Berlin and become part of a monument dedicated to Mussolini – only for the pillars never to be picked up and the monument never to be built. Instead, they now serve as manifold reminders of our pasts: The hay day of the travertine quarries, the megalomaniacal nazi rule, and the plentitude of changes this area has undergone since as it sought to keep up with a present marching on. The pillars, at the center of this, serve as the most visible time capsule in the vicinity and, in dwarfing us, but being dwarfed by their surroundings, provide us with a scale for both time and space.

In the face of all of its past industrial and military use, it may not naturally follow that the Travertinpark now has become what it is – a park, renaturalized alongside the gentrification of the adjacent district throughout the last decade. Yet, in an effort to preserve both nature and history, the park, interspersed with info stelae and remnants of industrial machinery, has become a walk-in memorial of its various past purposes and an approximation of nature, of what might have been, had the humans not been. Even now, the space keeps evolving as structures fall into disrepair and the overgrowth reclaims paths, as info posts are vandalized and empty bottles lie around. While the present will probably always sustain the impression to be situated at the ‘end of history,’ this park, more than most urban spaces, highlights that, if there even may be an end, we have most probably not reached it yet.