Die Menschen sind im ganzen Leben blind.“ 2025
At Frontviews Berlin 2025.
Topography of the Self and Strange Lands explore the paradox of beauty masking ecological destruction. Both collages confront how visual aesthetics can obscure environmental trauma, turning sites of extraction into landscapes of illusion.
The photographic base for Topography of the Self was taken at the Tagebau Nochten lignite mine, near the Polish border. Here, workers extract lignite — a low-grade coal with a high moisture and ash content for use in energy production. Next to this huge industrial area is a well-kept park, a man-made landscape that is meant to look peaceful and well-organised. Mining operations violently unearthed glacial stones, which people then reposition as aesthetic objects within this cultivated green space. This body of work explores the tension between extraction and preservation, and between destruction and beautification. It reveals how a landscape shaped by industrial exploitation can be transformed into an image of natural harmony.
The park becomes both a reminder of ecological loss and a way of concealing the scale of extraction. Through collage, I explore how beauty can reveal and obscure the violence behind a landscape, and how an image can shape our perception of the environmental damage it hides.
In Strange Lands, a fictional landscape unfolds against an excavated terrain. At its centre, a Romantic-era oil painting introduces an idealised vision of nature, contrasting with the damaged earth surrounding it. The collage explores how images of beauty can alter our perception of a landscape and soften the reality of its destruction.
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