Untitled for Lost or Found in Translation

Untitled, for Lost and Found in Translation.

Giessen 2007

A group of artists was invited by the DAAD to do a series of interventions at the University of Giessen during the Lost or Found in Translation conference. Everything happened in a weekend. We had the hard task of reaching our audience in between lectures.

My project consisted on reporting on my colleagues’ works and leave a trace of all what happened at the site. I printed the pictures and stuck them on the wall where the event happened and continued happening. The idea was to end up covering a large part of the walls with the images as the hours passed, but at one point the building manager made me take everything down. I had to find another solution. So I printed very small images that I stuck to the ground, in between the feet of the audience. I felt I was disturbing them.

People stepped on them and played little attention to what was happening. I questioned my own work in that particular place and if media would have any impact showing insignificant events. I accepted and enjoyed my little insignificant intervention that used photography as a non-valuable object.

Sind sie Kasseler?

Sind Sie Kasseler?

Kassel 2007

In 2007, fascinated by the more than 300 images I had bought two years before in a second-hand shop for 3 euros in Kassel, I started a journey. I went back with the excuse of finding the unknown owner of the pictures. He is seen getting older from the 20’s to the 70’s, and from the 50’s on, in Kassel. I decided to follow the archaeology of the images, the information on the front and on the back of each picture, to get any clues regarding who that man could have been, while I went through the city I had lived in before without ever meeting any real Kasselers.

I went to the City archive, the Documenta archive, the Deutsche Bank main office, the house of one of his possible former friends (his wife told me so, but could not talk to him cause he was very sick), the Retro Paradis second hand shop, photography shops, the City Hall…  Most people I talked to were willing to help me but it turned to be impossible. The identity of this man still remains unknown to me.

Forgotten photographs were a tool that led me through a city full of places to discover and people to meet. They were given a new meaning beyond its original function.

All the Places that Won’t Work