Ashuchit/Fichte

The subject of memory stands at the heart of this personal yet universal work. In Ashuchit/Fichte, my work fluctuates between nature and artifice, documentation and fabrication, life and taxidermy.
In Bayreuth, Germany I documented a personal journey following the footsteps of memoirs left by my cartographer grandfather. After transcribing dozens of sound files of his memoires, I composed a list of places my grandfather mentioned in his birth town. It is a mundane, everyday list that contains locations such as the milkman, the Oberrealschule where he and his brothers went to school, the button factory that brought his family to bankruptcy, and the swimming pool. Throughout this journey in his birth city I collected flowers in specific locations. I recorded the exact coordinates of the location, documented the surrounding urban and natural landscapes in still photographs and then blurred the map of the city to the extent that the context vanishes. The flowers, having been meticulously collected, are then photographed, printed and excised from the paper. These two-dimensional flowers are then arranged into a series of wreaths which in turn are photographically documented again and again in a sterile studio.