Post-Shelter
2025
Performative sculpture, public installation
charred timber, postbox
Wiener Platz, Stuttgart-Feuerbach (DE)
At the centre of Wiener Platz in Stuttgart-Feuerbach stands a bunker that most people walk over obliviously. Built during the Second World War to shelter factory workers, the bunker later housed displaced and homeless families before falling into silence. What did not fall silent was what had seeped into the ground beneath it: chromium VI, a toxic compound from the neighbouring electroplating factory Gebrüder Schoch that was bombed during the war, and had contaminated the soil and groundwater before it was recognised and the site was cleaned up by the city of Stuttgart: 140,000 tonnes of contaminated earth were removed in 2015–16.
Post-Shelter began with this threshold — between past and present, crisis and care, what a shelter protects and what it fails to protect. Over two months, a hut built from charred timber using the traditional Japanese technique shou-sugi-ban stood on the square. Blackened against weathering and decay, it read simultaneously as shelter and ruin. On it, a postbox invited young people to submit drawings in response to a simple question: what gets left off the table?
The project unfolded around three survival elements — roof, water, food — with fire at its centre. Artist and nest-builder Nicolas Panelli led a four-day workshop in which participants constructed temporary structures from foraged materials: earth, reed, cord, fallen branches gathered from the city's forgotten margins. SUPER VIVAZ conducted a durational rainwater collection performance, capturing rain on site with inverted umbrellas and a converted industrial vacuum — a quiet act of attention against the violence of industrial runoff. Shinroku Shimokawa cooked foraged ingredients — summer porcini, nettles, elderflower — in the square, turning survival food into shared pleasure. An open call gathered emergency recipes: dishes that had carried people through difficult times.
The publication Post-Shelter-Stimmen — 58 pages, full colour on recycled paper. Printed in a limited edition of 150. Limited remaining copies are available for €12 each + shipping costs. Contact us directly at findingthewild.eu@gmail.com
Chromschutz, a proposal for a permanent sculpture on the site — cast branches in chrome steel, skeletal and silvery, referencing both the contaminated history and the possibility of new growth — remains an unrealised proposal for the site's future.
Photos: Johannes Ocker/Julian Rettig