When I first visited the Harz Mountains, in the late spring of 2022, I knew nothing of bark-boring beetles or ‘natural dynamic zones’. The Harz were simply the nearest expanse of what I imagined to be ‘wilderness’ to home. I yearned to be outdoors for a couple of days, to feel briefly free from the rhythms of urban life - and Google showed me lush conifer forests cascading over steep gorges, castles perched above cobbled towns, even beady-eyed wildcats. It was more than enough to persuade, and I jumped on a train to Ilsenburg, a small town on the range’s northern fringe.
What I found in the mountains that weekend, in an area designated, in one of the last acts of the East German government, as a National Park, was something quite different to my imagination: a stark and perplexing landscape, an unsettling one; yet which became, over the course of weeks and months, something of an obsession as the Harz bloomed in my mind from dark-green blotch on satellite mode to multifaceted enigma, crucible for Magic and Science. This is a series about finding beauty amidst ruins, fleeting transcendence in a human-altered world, and a partial release from the burden of the past. It unfolds as a narrative journey from a definite place, a hill overlooking Ilsenburg, to what I conceive of as a kind of non-place, a tenuous utopia: a shimmering reservoir in the dying days of summer.