Niemandsland
I have a shelter. Not a building, not an institution, no sign on the wall. It exists in my studio, inside an old cabinet that once belonged to my grandmother. That’s where they are kept: discarded photographs, negatives from private lives, fragments of Super 8 film in which a summer moves that no one remembers anymore.
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I have a shelter for images that have lost their home. I don’t know exactly when it began. Perhaps the first time I opened a box of photographs at a flea market and realized that this had once been someone’s world. That someone had captured these moments, and that they still ended up there, among tableware, discarded books, and a stack of records by James Last.
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I can’t leave them behind. It’s stronger than me. As if I need to restore something I didn’t break, as if I can’t bear the idea of an image losing its address.
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They lie together in my cabinet. I don’t organize them, and I don’t try to recover their story. What moves me is not who or what it was, but that it once existed, briefly.
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In one of the Super 8 fragments, a woman with dark curls appears. In a light blue, flowing dress, she moves through a room with an open window. For a moment, she looks at the camera, then turns her head away.
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This is not my memory, but I found it. Without date, without name. Still, it feels familiar.
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Slides, photographs — images that would otherwise disappear. Perhaps that’s why I take them with me, simply to prevent them from being lost immediately.
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In my studio, a few of them sometimes end up on the table. A slide against the window, a negative held up to the light. I look at them the way you look at a landscape you’ve never been to, just to see what is still visible: a hand on a shoulder, a dog walking half out of frame, a house with its windows open, a ship disappearing on the horizon. It may no longer exist.
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They are fragments of worlds that were once complete. Now they have become loose pieces. But as long as someone looks at them, they are not entirely gone. That thought stays with me.
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What remains when no one is looking anymore? What actually happens when a memory no longer has a place to live?
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When something is no longer seen — a face, a house, a memory — it slowly slips out of the world. Perhaps that is why I try to create a place where it can remain a little longer.
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I keep returning to found images. They hold on to a moment, while at the same time showing how easily everything disappears.
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Photographs with fold lines, photographs without names, broken slides, Super 8 frames where the light has already eaten through — faces that look at you but no longer reveal anything.
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There must be a place where all these images go: an archive that no one manages, an in-between space, a land beyond time. I call it Niemandsland.
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A place where images arrive when they have lost their address. There lie moments from albums no one opens anymore, houses once lived in where now only light falls through the roof, and images that are damaged but not yet gone.
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We preserve everything nowadays. Our photos live on phones, hard drives, and in the cloud; we make backups of our memories. But preserving is not the same as holding on. An image can remain while its story has already dissolved.
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It is not a museum, not an archive, not a guarantee. Only a temporary place where what is almost gone may briefly come into the light.