Everything is different here. On Sylt, everyone gets out of their old routine. Everyone sees, hears and smells something they don’t know. A tiny village instead of a bustling city. Horizons bounded by water instead of endless grey suburbia. The broad, distressing sky instead of protective forests and hills. Plus wind, light, air, a source of neverending, frustrating research for scientists in the past decades. Which is finally doomed to failure as soon as it comes to explaining the different effects of these immense factors on two separate people. Far too many variables.

But something always takes effect on all the writers, musicians, painters and filmmakers whom the founder Indra Wussow invites to Rantum on Sylt. Some spend night after night discussing the meaning of life with the others. Some barricade themselves into their apartments for weeks on end. And then others get together to work on a project, the results of which are exhibited in the gallery of the kunst:raum sylt quelle a few months later. An inspiring place, and a free place. The literary scholar Indra Wussow is the director, curator, hostess and go-between in this unique construction that goes against all simple labels. The five apartments on the grounds of the mineral spring Sylt Quelle house some 50 different artists throughout the year.

For 130 years or so, Sylt has been a meeting place for wordsmiths, performers and artists; much longer than the repeated and now distorted clichés of the island as a playground of the rich and famous. The first painters came as bathers, however, and were more shocked than inspired by the provincial accommodation and the bare landscape. That all changed with the fashion of open-air painting in the 1870s and 1880s. In the following years, the village of Kampen became a particularly popular destination for entire circles of artists. Publishers were also very present: Ferdinand Avenarius, Siegfried Jacobsohn and Ernst Rowohlt, bringing writers and musicians in their wake—and everyone else as well. By the twenties, half of Berlin spent the summer at Clara Tiedemann’s Haus Kliffende. Thomas Mann wrote weighty words in the guest book, the conductor Erich Kleiber sat at the piano, Emil Nolde spent a summer in Kampen while his house in Seebüll was being decorated.

Summers were for Sylt, with the long dark winters better spent in the midst of the city’s conveniences. But friends of the island value the quiet times most of all. Winners of the foundation’s most prominent grant, our writers in residence, do well to divide their stay between summer and winter. At Easter, Sylt puts on new clothes and doesn’t take its Gucci sunshades off until after the autumn break. The kunst:raum sylt quelle becomes a much more public place than out of season. The courtyard between the hall, the residential building and the glass Quellenpavillon is overrun with sun-worshipping coffee-drinkers. The production hall is the "grand hall" for theatre, readings, concerts and the presentations of the Summer of Science. Pictures, sculptures and installations are on show on the top floor of the Quellenhaus.

Most of these works are only loosely connected with the island of Sylt, if at all; the guests are free to choose their own themes. But in the diverse networks that have arisen and been further spun between the friends of the kunst: raum sylt quelle, one can occasionally make out the influence of this place. Subtle as the play of light in a picture or a sound sample in a composition, more explicit in Hartmut Andryczuk’s work on Sylt’s military history or Judith Kuckart’s project on the dancer and cabaret artiste Valeska Gert, who lived in Kampen from 1951 to her death in 1978.

Kornelia Roßkothen