Marie Jeschke - Happy End
Marie Jeschke — Happy End
The work of multidisciplinary artist Marie Jeschke often pivots around the topics of transformation, concentration, and transference. Here at Vorfluter, she follows the path of the Berlin sewage system, tracing a line connecting sinks to rivers, people to pipes, stories to systems.
In preparation for Happy End, Marie Jeschke’s research shifted from natural bodies of water to man-made water systems. Whereas water itself—the H₂O that came into being 2.5 billion years ago—remains chemically the same, its visible form and consistency change as it passes through repeated cycles of transformation. Like our circulatory system—pumping and converting blood from deoxygenated to oxygenated—water circulates from natural repositories, becomes soiled through human usage, and is later purified in treatment plants. All the while, it acts as a diary, absorbing and inscribing information. A carrier, water takes in foreign physical and metaphysical presences: organisms, bacteria, dirt—but also perhaps memories, emotions, habits.
In her 1977 essay “Holy Water,” Joan Didion wrote with devout reverence about the provenance of her drinking water: “The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is.” In a similarly reverent gesture, Jeschke followed, almost religiously, the subsequent path of the water cycle: the sewage.
Connecting neighbourhoods, streets, buildings, apartments, sinks, and toilets, Berlin’s complex radial system of city bowels ultimately unites all its inhabitants into a singular act of evacuation. Although an ancient invention, modern sewage systems only became widespread toward the end of the 19th century. They marked not just an end to the unsanitary conditions and diseases ravaging large cities, but also created a new form of urban togetherness. Modern sewage unifies people in radically egalitarian ways: every single act of release converges into a common destination. Visible waste and invisible data are brought together into the oneness of the city.
What can waste water tell us? What has it seen? Probably everything. Tales of life, of people, their dreams and failures. City animals and plants, time woven into nature’s cycles. A wet daze of happy ends soaking through metal and plastic pipes, centrifuged in a solid fusion of compact energy ready to be burnt. Marie Jeschke searches precisely for this, a sort of concentration of the city’s unconscious.
The exhibition at Vorfluter is structured as a metaphorical radial system itself, where each work contributes to this search for essence. On the ground floor, the viewer is greeted by an imposing suspended object, reminiscent of a ceiling lamp. Signs of use—dirt, rust—bear witness to its past activity. This is a time-worn module used in UV water treatment. In a typical purification structure, over 30 of these modules would process the water. Here, the installation lights up at times in ways which might seem random, but that are fully ruled by natural cycles of the human body.
One painting faces the light installation. Continuing Jeschke’s self-developed technique of subaquatic work, the artist submerges herself and her paintings in bodies of water and acts as a transmitter of unpronounceable knowledge—from liquid to canvas. Whereas earlier works were produced in natural environments, here, the artist performs within the sewer itself, channeling and releasing through her gestures the repositories of the urban past.
A staircase takes the viewer down into the underbelly of the building, where soiled wet wipes appear to float among moving images of microscopic creatures. Over the course of several months (Feb - April), Jeschke recorded a diary of spunlace nonwoven, wet wipes—notes, drawings, and stains cover a fabric designed for hygiene, yet not intended to enter the sewage system. Curious objects in the shape of snow-globes are positioned all around the space, inviting to be shaken. Filled with murky sewage water, their glass stands as the barrier between here and the untouchable. Fitting into the human innate curiosity, playing on our feelings of the uncanny and our deep-rooted voyeurism, these globes tickle the raw nerves of our brains’ chemoreceptor trigger zone, responsible for nausea. They are however leak proof, miniature galaxies hiding inside poems and drawings scribbled, here again, on wet wipes.
Like toxins, microplastics, or metals within the human body, wet wipes pollute the sewers. They braid together in long, fibrous corks that clog pipes—and sometimes even tunnels. Unable to dissolve, they amalgamate with fatbergs, often requiring quasi-surgical human intervention. Incidentally, the local discounter wet wipes brand name utilised in this experiment is precisely “Happy End”, an unexpected fit opening to a variety of associations of concepts, facts and postulations.
Nonetheless, the artist resists a purely critical tone. Instead, she uses wet wipes as metaphor—they are information carriers, much like water itself.
It is easy to dismiss this as artistic, perhaps even paranormal, appropriation of the world—and Jeschke is well aware of this risk. But when we consider the vast array of other life forms that inhabit water, we are reminded that we are not alone. We tend to believe that only humans—made in the image of (some) God—are capable of consciousness and communication. But science has proven us wrong time and again, and luckily continues to evolve. Why do we insist on communication being verbal? Have we not shown that it can take other forms—telepathic, energetic, molecular ?
Not long ago, René Descartes vivisected living puppies, believing them to be without pain or consciousness. Today, we know better. And perhaps acknowledging the trillions of microorganisms that live in water and work to purify our sewage can help us understand something deeper: that water allow a different type of disclosure.
Happy End invites us into a kind of radical intimacy—with the city, with our waste, with what lives in water and is not yet named. The sewers, designed to conceal and forget, here become sites of connection. Underneath it all, the city speaks. The question is: are we ready to listen ?
Info+
– exhibition text –
Marie Jeschke - Happy End
Vorfluter
Donaustraße 112, 12043 Berlin, Germany
Exhibition from May 04th – June 01st, 2025
Curator : Gabriela Anco
