Script of Demolition

The action of gravity on a mass produces both a physical and emotional weight. When we watch a building topple there is an empathetic reflex — a sublime pathos independent from the event’s material and historical significance, its symbolic import (the announced death of modern architecture, for example), or even our possible emotional attachment to the building concerned — that comes from witnessing a previously inanimate object succumb to the same forces to which we feel ourselves subjected.

Martin Fink, a German demolitions expert, evokes this tendency toward personification in his recollection of a job that didn’t go according to plan. Fink Sprengtechnik, the demolition outfit run by his family for three generations, had been hired to tear down a church tower in Stuttgart, Germany. However, after the first round of detonations, the building remained standing. While the nature of the Finks’ professional responsibilities required that they maintain a scientific outlook on the situation, Fink recalls how the onlookers who had gathered to watch reacted emotionally. “The people were thinking, ‘It doesn’t want to fall…’” A technical miscalculation was reinterpreted as the building’s desire to live. It turned out that one of the contractors who had built the tower was also a parishioner who, imagining that it was meant to stand forever, had added reinforcement beyond the plan’s specifications.

Often there are only seconds between the ignition of a blasting charge and the collapse of a building, but the planning for such a demolition can take weeks. Blasting is a profession that relies on experience, and that is conveyed through the medium of the image. The blaster, before he destroys the building, makes a complex technical drawing of the progression. The detonation itself is then recorded by several cameras from different view points. Afterwards the drawings are superposed over the photographs in order to control the blast. A permanent calibration, an optimization between the idea and the reality by the means of drawing and photography. In her artistic work, Alina Schmuch also mostly uses the medium of photography. For the project Script of Demolition she worked with the extensive image archive of the blaster family Fink. The publication includes different imaging media—from 8mm film to digital photography. The book presents movement sequences of collapsing chimneys, TV towers and buildings that have been recorded following explicitly nonaesthetic criteria. 

In this homage to demolition, artist Alina Schmuch presents over 60 years of Fink Sprengtechnik’s archive across 336 pages, with graphic design by Jan Kiesswetter and an essay by Philip Ursprung. Although purportedly aesthetically unselfconscious, the Fink images, which range from tragicomic cartoon diagrams to film sequences, are captivating, and evoke works by artists such as John Baldessari, Gordon Matta-Clark, Eva Hesse, or Fischli and Weiss. Yet, despite these coincidental resemblances, the collection is full of its own stylistic idiosyncrasies. And even though the Finks maintain that for them the images are purely technical — useful evidence and reference documents — co-editor Armin Linke accurately observes, in the book’s foreword, that the family’s collection demonstrates “more artistry than a lot of artists.”