Mute

In her artistic works Jeewi Lee (*1987) searches for historical traces. She lays open what she finds and uses a range of techniques to make this comprehensible and tangible to the viewer. The artist’s enquiries have continued at the Silbersee, where she has examined the site’s changing history and conducted local interviews. The result is a poetic, subtle and elusive work: in the centre of the lake, large air bubbles rise at irregular intervals from the lake bed and then burst on the surface of the water. Like the bubbles of a fish, they too are – apart from a faint bubbling noise – mute (which gives the work its title) but allow us to sense that they allude to something hidden.

Here, where people now spend their free weekends enjoying the natural surroundings, was the site of a large prisoner of war camp during World War I, where up to 10,000 prisoners from various different European countries were interned. Apart from a plaque on the beach, very little evidence of this can still be seen because at the time of the camp, the lake did not exist – it was only excavated later to extract quartz sand before it was repurposed as a bathing lake in 2005.