The Super Market Tour
audio tour, poster;
Berlin, 2015
”What are the hyper-typical landscapes of the modern age?
– I identify three types: the supermarket, the theme park (such as Disneyland), and the preserved historical city center.“
(Lucius Burckhardt, “Wasteland As Context.Is There Any Such Thing As The Postmodern Landscape?“, 1989, in: “Why Is Landscape Beautiful? The Science of Strollology“, 2015)
The Super Market Tour is an audio guide that leads the listener through a supermarket. The store and it‘s supporting structures are described meticulously from a future perspective. Like that the supermarket is declared a living History museum. The commonplace becomes outdated and strange, such as a knight‘s castle or colonial village might appear nowadays.
To understand the time from the end of the Cold War to the dawn of Post-Capitalism, an investigation of the “supermarket“ is essential. This survey gathered internet-archaeological finds of supermarkets in Berlin dated to the year 2008. They could be reconstructed in the course of an investigation of the “Google Maps“.
A supermarket was a big shop in the Capitalist age. Food, beverages and other products for daily needs were offered. The goods were delivered in self-service. They were not freely available, but had to be paid. As it can be clearly seen in the overview, supermarkets were all similar. Mostly they were functional low-rise buildings with few access points. All supermarkets pictured here belonged to different retail chains, markets that belonged to the same group. They had the same name and logo, were constructed similarly and sold the same products. The stores had short, concise and abstract names. For example, “LIDL“, “ALDI“, “REWE“ or “EDEKA“.
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