Fiction and imaginability
In places of light-loving darkness, long unused and taken over by vegetation, transience is palpable and history is present. History that leaves even the best war films behind in terms of fiction and imaginability. In places that are well hidden, in the middle of forests, almost untouched and long unvisited, there is a gigantomania that is hardly imaginable.
Everything comes from a time when man and nature had to subordinate themselves to the dictatorship and the associated military megalomania. Unimaginable quantities of concrete and steel were used to withstand the bombardments of the Allies and to achieve the supposed final victory. After decades of weathering and being reclaimed by the surrounding vegetation, facilities and buildings that cannot simply be demolished or even blown away due to their partly indestructible basic substance have become a world that is shrouded in mystery and gloomy, but also beautiful in its silence.
The decay, however, pains the viewer and also shows the human unwillingness to create and preserve a differentiated image of history. But there is also a lack of political insight to capture these “lost places” as memories or to shape them as new beginnings.
For what man abandons today, nature reclaims. It is the mysticism and dystopia of immoderate Nazi architecture that I as an artist want to depict and express through my photographic works. They show the morbid beauty of decay and raise the existential question of our existence.
