It is more than a year ago when I announced the decision by the Office for Culture of the Canton Fribourg to award me with their bi-annual Photographic Research of Fribourg. That’s a long time for a project “right in front of your doorstep” which is also not quite true, for each meeting, portrait or encounter involved 3 hours of a train ride or drive with the car. Since my submitted project left almost everything open, apart from the fact, that I wanted to meet people, in their homes and photograph them, it became kind of endless - and the appearance of Covid-19 didn’t make it easier. For some months the project came to a complete standstill.
Selecting and sequencing the portraits with the book designers of atlasstudio.ch in Zürich.
Photocopying, shuffling, cutting, glueing - making a first dummy.
The project is an experiment. There is no subject other than to meet random people, they should not represent anything else than who they are. That sounds simple and easy - isn’t that like every portrait we are looking at? Needless to say, I don’t think so. The only clear parameter I had, was the territory of the Canton, the people I was going to meet had to be inside it’s boundaries. How would I find these people? After all, these days things have become complicated. Simply chatting up someone in front of the local grocery store, asking if it is fine to accompany him or her to their home, where we then would have a drink, sit down and do the portrait - I don’t think so.
The photography part ist done. I made about 60 portraits over the course of a year. Some of them did not make it into the book and the selection for the exhibition will be even tighter.
Also, for most of the year I kept working on a series of drawing, collages and objects. They are conceptually connected to the photographs - visualizing aspects of my work which is not reflected in the portraits itself. Questions of the territory, the landscape and the relationship of the individual and within a society.
The show is scheduled to open on Friday 20 November 2020 at the Fri-Art Kunsthalle in Fribourg
“The drawings are an attempt to create an environment in which the portraits are placed. They visualize questions around territory, the landscape and the relationship of the individual within society.”
