Black Gold

This proposal temporarily transforms the courtyard monument of Elector Frederick William I by burying it with a large mound of shredded tyre rubber. Rising around the equestrian statue, the black mass partially engulfs the monument, altering its silhouette and relationship to the surrounding space.

Rubber was known as "black gold" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its extraction fuelled industrial expansion while linking Europe to systems of violence and exploitation in regions such as the Congo and the Amazon. These histories remain embedded within the material long after their origins have disappeared from public view since every fragment of rubber carries the history of its extraction.

Composed of discarded tyres, the mound brings together the colonial history of rubber extraction and the environmental consequences of contemporary consumption. The monument appears to emerge from the very material that helped sustain industrialisation.

By partially burying the equestrian statue, the intervention shifts attention from the figure it commemorates to the material histories beneath it. The monument becomes inseparable from the networks of extraction, labour and environmental transformation that made imperial expansion possible.