“Everything in this city of the past seems to dissolve upward. The geometric system of the walls slides downward and turns to the cycle of nature. Kleiner Gebirge remains firmly fixed in this floating state between nature and architecture.” The work created for the synagogue by Löhr takes its name, meaning small mountain, from its rounded shapes, crags, and hollows. The same features have appeared on other occasions under the title Kleiner Temple or small temple. Made out of ivy seeds, Kleiner Gebirge stands in a glass case on a marble table in the chamber that once housed the oven for baking unleavened bread and may have originally been a reception area.
As a ruin, the synagogue is thus seen by Löhr, like the rest of the settlement of Ostia Antica, as architecture sliding slowly but relentlessly toward the nature from which it once rose in sovereign splendor. The process is today in a phase of dynamic equilibrium, with the vertical line of the walls offset by their winding horizontal course. Löhr interprets this balance structurally and formally. Her micro-architecture is in fact constructed with elements drawn from nature and combines the horizontal and vertical axes in the organic profile of spires and pinnacles. What building procedure is employed? In the course of long and frequent walks through the countryside, Löhr collects elements of all sorts: hair of dogs and horses, dandelions, stems and seeds of various plants including ivy, thistles, agrimony and burdock. She does not look for them but finds them by chance according to her mood. Her sensitivity in feeling the sudden attraction of leaves, plants, berries and small animals is truly unique, something unknown even to those who have known the places for years. Löhr then takes what she has gathered back to the studio and puts it to one side while awaiting inspiration. Differing in structure, shape and color, her materials share the fact of being abstract. In other words, the artist does not use nature for floral compositions but in order to create abstract sculptures, architectural structures and installations. Seeds and berries are her bricks, modular elements to be combined freely but in accordance with rules that they themselves lay down