Jost Wischnewski | Die Fläche | 2016

Jost Wischnewski ventures to cast a new glance at the Teufelsmoor – the landscape that was transfigured to a late Romantic landscape of longing more than 100 years ago by painters such as Fritz Overbeck, Otto Modersohn or Heinrich Vogeler – although the Teufelsmoor had already stopped being an idyllic, untouched landscape for a long time towards the end of the 19th century.

Instead, the region was already characterized by large-scale peat-cutting and miles of drainage ditches in those days: evidence of commercial use, which ever since then has dominated the landscape until today. For more than 10 years, Jost Wischnewski has photographed the moor near Worpswede and Gnarrenburg, where peat is still mined nowadays. In his photographs, he shows the traces of the changes that peat extraction inscribes into a landscape, which has grown over thousands of years, and scrutinizes the landscape of the Teufelsmoor that has long since become a myth.