In recent years, with emerging technologies, photography takes part in our lives on a daily basis. I see photography as an opportunity to create an alternative reality.
I use it as a tool for creating a new space which cannot exist in in the actual world. Once I put this space inside a photo, it exists. This could be equivalent, for example, to a virtual space online.
In 2013 I moved to Berlin, Germany for six months. In Berlin, I discovered a fascinating, evolving and surprising city, which was at the same time calm and welcoming. However, I could not disconnect my fresh experience in the city from the stories I heard when I was younger. Those stories from world war two tainted the city with a dark layer which became part of my present experience in the city.
I felt like I was trapped in the middle, falling in love with this fascinating city but still remembering its past. This “trap” I was in made me want to create an in-between space, a space which would consist elements from a dark past and a mesmerizing present. I created a visual space between my family's history and my present experience in Berlin.
The technique I used in this project comprised of me first redesigning existing spaces using hand crafted cardboard sculptures. I would then photograph these redesigned spaces thousands of times. The spaces which I occupied with my cardboard structures were not really mine, rather I was a guest in them. Only when I turned them into totally new spaces, by creating collages out of the many photographs I made, I could feel like I had a space that was completely my own. A world which is composed from the complexity of my family’s history with fragments of the present.
