“From The Flowers, corpses grow.”
Built by Albert Speer in Berlin to test the possibility of constructing large buildings on Berlin’s marshy ground, this megalith of concrete — that lazy, slovenly, sluttish material — the Schwerbelastungskörper, stands as the antithesis of New Juche’s The Worm. Where concrete spreads dull and ponderously in thrall to gravity, The Worm is a Gesamtkunstwerk of polyphony, stagecraft and levitation, with its ludic prose vision of Hitler’s visage, the schizo-analysis of photography, the language of labyrinths, and the semiotics of structures both social and National Socialist. Possessed by a spurious European homesickness, and a strange ethnographic anomaly from Europe’s polar opposite, New Juche examines the inner voice of cultural transmission in the incubating mechanisms of art and architecture, detritus, and the culpable, omnivorous maw of fascination. The Worm also burrows into ineffably personal territory, as the author spends his final days in The Flowers, the nightmarish abandoned housing complex he has occupied in one sense or another for the last decade.