Heimat

Between perception and memory

In my photographic work I am interested in the moment when outer reality, perception, and memory join together. I do not understand landscape as a fixed place, but as an open structure that forms itself anew in the act of seeing. In this process the idea of Heimat also arises for me, not as a geographic point, but as an inner state.

My work begins in observation and is closely tied to my own surroundings. The landscapes I work with are familiar, they carry traces of a place I know. Through the deliberate movement of the camera during the exposure, however, I detach myself from a purely documentary depiction. Familiar structures begin to flow, orientation shifts, and out of concrete places emerge pictorial spaces in which the visible overlays itself with inner images and develops a reality of its own.

Nature, for me, is not a motif in the classical sense, but a space of experience. In it I encounter time, change, and cyclical processes directly. Emergence and passing, stillness and movement exist at once. This simultaneity shapes my work and my understanding of Heimat as something that cannot be fixed in place, but forms itself anew in the experience, again and again.

Perception, for me, is not a passive occurrence but an active process. What is seen joins with memory, shifts, and condenses. In these transitions pictorial spaces arise that detach themselves from their documentary origin and develop a presence of their own. They move within a state that is not clearly determined and precisely for that reason remains open to different readings.

I am driven by the experience that nothing remains permanently fixed. Change is not an exceptional state, but a universal principle. In my work, Heimat therefore does not appear as a counterpoint to this movement, but as something that takes shape within it.

My photographs do not describe places. They make states of being tangible. They open a space in which outer and inner reality meet, and in which viewers, too, may find their own memories, sensations, and imaginings overlapping. What emerges is a pictorial space that shows not only my perception, but connects to fundamental experiences reaching beyond the concrete place.