In the work Memento I visit historically important places, which have –from my point of view– been almost forgotten.
When there, I take photographs of the location. Then, I put these on porcelain tiles and bring these small sculptures back to the place where I took the photographs.
In 2008 I traveled the former boarder that parted East- from West- Germany from 1948 until 1990. It was a journey of 1400 km trough 8 different federal states of Germany. After Second World War Germany was occupied by two different ideologies, Communism and Capitalism (Soviet Union and Western authorities). The Communist part started building a really crazy fortification along the boarder. They had to resettle people living along the boarder, they split villages and there where even villages removed. This boarder was built of high metal fences and walls, barbed wire, alarms, anti-vehicle ditches, watchtowers, automatic shooting traps and minefields. They literally wanted to protect their ideology.
I camped along the route and it was like every summer in Germany mostly raining and quite cold. I was interested in the former boarder because it had been such a big political and social instrument for a long time and it still is an issue in present politics. I knew what it looked like from history books and from television, but now I wanted to know what was left of it. Before I traveled I did some research. I made a list of museums and other relevant places along the way. What I found interesting is how people handle their history. Some places had really good information centers and museums; For example they left pieces of the boarder untouched and made publicly accessible. But I also visited private documentation centers that have been put together by people living in the area. They were really naive, but that was interesting in a way. Some parts of the journey I couldn’t even find any traces of the boarder. It seamed that some states removed every trace. I don’t know if that has to do with politics or it’s just something I noticed. I found really beautiful places that were kind of no man’s land. There was no sign of the former boarder, but you could see a certain kind of structure in the landscape.
