"Wassel Mittellandkanal"

Germany

pigmentbased inkjet print

In the summer of 2020, the Cologne-based artist Boris Becker photographed all bridges on a nearly two-month trip with his boat over the inland waterways of Europe from Holland to Poland. The 650 bw motifs are not put into a typological comparison in a traditional sense, but presented in a chronological and topographical sequence in an extensive publication with 1296 pages. Following the concept of a photographic road movie and mostly taken from the middle of the water, the images show a vast variety of bridge structures from the last 150 years. At the same time, despite their diversity, the individual images seem to merge into a single shot due to their visual similarity.

With a length of 325 km, the Mittellandkanal (MLK) is the longest artificial waterway in Germany. In a broader sense, it is part of a connection between the Rhine and the Oder. On a European scale, it enables a connection between the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Switzerland on the one hand and with Poland and the Czech Republic on the other.