Photo Shooting – Winter 2021 | Despite the pandemic lockdown in Europe I got the chance to visit Finland and pursue my project in a secure environment at Serlachius Residency in Mänttä one hour east of Tampere. Right after the opening of my exhibition in February I could start the black and white photo portraits with my analogue equipment. For this occasion I used a Mamiya RB 67 loaded with Fujifilm Neopan. At home I started with the post production, developing the film negative and manipulating the chemical surface of the slides.

Photo-shooting – Spring 2020 |A fresh insight into my most recent work from my Swiss exile. Reflecting on pandemic shelter. Working with the negative slides refreshes my memories of the summer in the Alps living in a Swiss castle. The poetic times are obvious gone, shelter and isolation is about to visit again. The analogue photography completes my works of paper clothes and taxidermic sculptures.
Starting the project in March with Max Frisch‘s „Man in the Holocene“ I would like to finalize with a poem:
In die Mulde meiner Stummheit
leg ein Wort
und zieh Wälder groß zu beiden Seiten, daß mein Mund
ganz im Schatten liegt.
Ingeborg Bachmann, 1953

Winter 2020 | Working again on the analoge slides from Iran. It was a most alienating experience and as a matter of fact a very nice and warm one too. I was the last artist who got the chance to get a funded residency at the Austrian embassy in Tehran. After that it was closed for good and the regime became even more restrictive towards foreigners and local artists. Since then is very hard to get into the country as foreign artist and work there at a residency.

Winter 2019 | Swatch Peace Art Hotel | Finally I could work on the remaining negative slides. Remembering Shanghai at the Swatch Peace Art Hotel I also think of all these interesting artists from all over the world which I met. Han Feng, a gifted painter who has also designed a collection watch for Swatch in 2019 was one of them. Our portrait session turned out quite well and this week I processed some old negative slides I never considered before. Hope you like the result. Yu Jidong 于继东 was another artist I learned to appriciate at the residency in Shanghai. Very humble, he introduced me to his family and his lovely daughter was a big help for my own art work research. And of course Soyung, a Korean artist which became a close friend of mine.

Photo Shooting Winter 2019 | The Winter in Estonia was quite remarkable. My photographic work and exhibition worked out great. I was invited to a traditional wedding by one of my new friends where I danced for the first time in years. People were nice and warmhearted, maybe comes with the cold weather and the snow.

The photographic settings in Tallin, Estonia were one of a kind. For sure I had to improvise a lot, as the residency was one of the shorter ones with a duration of two month. At this occasion I was not so much into creating garments out of paper as the possibilities were quite limited. On the other side I could show some first prints at the exhibition in the end of my second Baltic residency.

Photo Shooting Summer 2017 | In the summer of 2017, for the first time I had the possibility to work in a retirement home with some elderly people. The setting was quite a challenge within a tight time schedule. In my memory I think they all had quite a good time giving them a kind of distraction of daily life. For me this was a new experience and a big step of learning.