STATEMENT OF WORK

My working method is characterized by primarily working with an analog camera, although I also use a digital camera for some projects. Some of my photographic creation processes involve experimentation. For example, I might play with the exposure time or various aspects of development and postproduction.

Exemplary for this process is the photo series Forests in the Anthropocene (since 2019). Using a large format camera, I visited forests in the two US states of North Carolina and Massachusetts. In addition, I processed the photographs with different methods: some prints were exposed to intense heat, and others were solarized or etched with a laser cutter, distorting them beyond recognition. The variety of impacts created by global warming accelerates forest dieback worldwide, which is not only brought into the picture in terms of motifs but is also drastically visible on the material level. The consequences of man-made climate change are visualized this way. 

Even though most of my photographs do not show people directly, they talk about the traces left behind by people using or passing through these spaces. In my most recent project, The Absence and Presence of the Wall (2021-), I set out to find clues to the former German division along the 160 km long Berlin Wall Trail. With my camera, I document fractures that open up in urban architecture and observe how nature has reclaimed space and thus seems to have obliterated traces. Architecture and nature symptomatically refer to the psychological dimension of the German division. Through conversations and interviews with contemporary witnesses, residents along the Wall path, and those affected, I uncover wounds and document the history of reunification.

I examine urban and natural landscapes from a socio-political perspective, which, deriving from my training as a spatial planner and visual sociologist, deals with architecture in a specific way. The question of the extent to which architecture is used to stabilize political systems and visualize social hierarchy is the subject of my research. I want to highlight two works series, Slave Dwellings (2014-2022) and A Small Study of Concentration Camp Architecture (2015-2022).

I draw inspiration from the places where I live. Having lived in many different places and environments, from rural to suburban to urban, in Germany, England, and the United States, my projects are international yet site-specific. My marriage to an African American man has sensitized me to explore our relationship and the history of our families in the U.S. and Germany in projects that address slavery, the Holocaust, and World War II, among other topics. Accordingly, I am interested in themes that reach beyond the field of art. Through my projects, preceded by intensive research and span several years in their execution, I would like to contribute to an interdisciplinary and transcultural dialogue and make postcolonial historiography visible.