The Aachener designer and landscape artist, Martin Stockberg, has conjured up a piece of art in the sand again at the Soers

Many a bird, would if he could, rub his eyes in amazement at what has happened in the sand at the Soers. Because it is only possible to recognise what the Aachen-based designer and artist, Martin Stockberg, has conjured up in the sand in front of the Deutsche Bank Stadium at the CHIO Aachen grounds from a bird’s eye view.

The logo of the CHIO Aachen, the characteristic horse’s head is 35 x 35 metres, the piece of art as a whole measures 70 x 70 metres. It is impossible to identify it from the ground. It has literally gone to ground. A garden rake and two fine rakes are all that are needed to create the most flamboyant announcement of the CHIO Aachen digital (August 4^th-9^th). “Small team, big result,” grinned Martin Stockberg, who received assistance with the operation from the riders Lisa Prummenbaum from Kesternich and Alexandra Franzen from Düsseldorf.

Stockberg is currently on vacation in Bretagne. Whereby it is not a holiday in the classic sense of the word, he is namely also scratching a large-scale design into the sand there too, before it gets washed away by the tide a few hours later. Stockberg noted that transience is an essential element of his art. The Soers masterpiece will also become a thing of the past after two or three showers. Stockberg makes a sketch of the motifs beforehand, measures a few of the key points in advance too and does the rest from memory. “It is a question of rhythm and concentration,” Stockberg stated. And then it is almost a meditative procedure, namely when one walks backwards and forwards following the same patterns for half an hour, or in some cases much longer. The thoughts going round Lisa Prummenbaum’s head while yielding the rake were incidentally anything but esoteric: “If my mum sees me doing this, she’ll be dragging me in the garden.”

We spoke to Martin Stockberg about his art and also its transience.