DThe dinosaurs lay on the ground as if they had been fighting for a long time, the colorful wild cats did not spit out the roller coaster for a long time, and the swan also stood still for a long time. Abandoned, when you see Berlin’s Spree Park, you will think of it. Once the only amusement park in East Germany became the scene of a movie crime story after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the insolvent operator first fled to Peru and then was arrested for commercial use while trying to smuggle cocaine through a “flying carpet” truck. But the decayed attractions do not only carry the stories of the past; since the merry-go-round closed twenty years ago, a new life has settled here. This is a biome that shows who came when humans left.
On the reed roof of the old candy stand that once greeted guests in the park, small black stalk-hole bees from the Mediterranean region buzzed and were first spotted in Plänterwald in Germany. Wild cats have long been surrounded by trees. Dwarf duckweed is scattered in the concrete pool of the old water park in summer, and candelabra grows under the swan boat. In the middle, one can hear the sound of artist Marcus Maeder’s installation time and time again: the sound of water flowing through trees or the sound of earthworms digging holes on the earth—the sound of life that is actually everywhere.
