For some cities to exist it’s been necessary to develop means to provide them with the elements they wish to hold, to trade, to manage, to consume. For some cities it’s easier than for others.

Cities before cities are territories. Human genius might be expressed in the abilities to transform the environmental given conditions on behalf of the community they hold. Human ambition is definitely expressed in the shape and kind of these prosthesis, in the type of subjects they mean to attract, in the activities in which they allow us to engage.
In this sense city limits become portals of objects, of energies, of other communities. These limits might be conformed by water, walls, mountains, cliffs, deserts… always an element, a border which pretends to draw the political or physical boundaries, implementing structures and managing the landscape on behalf of economic goals without considering the habitat equilibrium.

Life develops in a sort of contrary sense, the logic of pollution, of dissemination, of sedimentation, a constant exchange between its diverse members. And so, suddenly, culture and nature draw a parallel activity: movement as the principle of conservation, of maintenance.


In Hamburg this dialectic is expressed in one subject: mud, mighty mud, as an obstacle, mighty mud as a lifesaver, an ecological niche, a (natural) tide regulator, and impediment for bigger ship containers. 

Hamburg is a port, a special kind of portal. An aquatic gate which extends its arms to welcome merchandise from all over the globe. It’s part of its identity, it’s genesis.  Along with the expansion of the city, there’s been a (global) development of technology which allows the building of bigger, heavier ships. Which can carry bigger, heavier and multiple loads. Thus the city has to make space to hold, manage and move this materiality. But for this to be successful the city needs to remove the mighty mud, only for it to come back in, dragged from the ties.

A quotidian image in the Elbe river is the coming and going of the ( insert name in german of the dragging ships), taking mud from one extreme of the delta to the next. Making us wonder:

How many of these ships are equivalent to the arrival of one cargo ship? How many trips of these ships is equivalent to one big tide event? In how many weeks would the Elbe’s bottom reject the giant ships coming in every day? How much mud has been removed over the time, and how has this manipulation has affected its constitution?


The intimate intertwining of this energetic flow –getting the mud out so that trade can come in–, makes us think about the scales at which this movement affects. How can we study the different micro-elements that speak of these relationships of nature-culture exchange through the categorisation and analysis of mud, and thus to understand its effect on the habitat for crabs, worms, mussels and sea snails among many other creatures of this ecosystem. Mud then becomes a key element to analyze components and it's different roles in carrying life or acknowledged desertifying soil processes.


A flux of energy and humans will keep this landscape inhabitable for the capitalist creatures, the carriers of goods & values, the activators of economy. In this market operation, who ends up winning? Hamburg? The market? The Elbe river’s swirling and winding?  Or a dismembered monster which aims to erase humanity off the land?


With the Elbe, It's a question of excavation or conservation, economy or ecology. Panosmico’s proposal for Merging Shores is a body implicated research on the micro and macro expressions of the mud and it’s capacity to tell a whole story of the nature culture relationships in Hamburg’s port.