Eisbergfreistadt

As well as some regular decks of playing cards, I also have a more unusual pack, one in which the four suits are birds, chimneys, icebergs and weeds. The ‘King’ cards from the former two suits are pictured above, those of the latter pair below. These were devised as part of an elaborate art project called Eisbergfreistadt realised in 2006-07 by the American artists Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick. The conceit behind it was that of an iceberg drifting into the Baltic in 1923, running aground off the German port town of Lübeck, whereupon some of the the townspeople moved on to the ice, establishing a short-lived ‘free city’ there with its own laws and currency.

The ‘joker’ cards in the deck bear a rhyme alluding to this scenario, one of them in English, the other in German. Nicholas Kahn had contacted me in connection with my old weblog, and we had sporadically corresponded for a time after that. He very kindly sent me two packs of these cards (“one to use + one to give away” as he wrote in an accompanying note). There are some more images from the Eisbergfreistadt project here & here, and more images of the playing cards here.