Bauhaus University Weimar and the ÉSAD Amiens cooperated on this photography project. Students and teachers from both universities visited first Weimar, then Amiens to create an exhibition about commemoration. We went to memorials, graveyards, museums and the general sights of each town. We had the other ones as our guests or were ourselves guests in their homes. We went to both schools together. We learned about each others lives, about similarities and differences, and about our pasts.
During my stay in Amiens, I instantly fell in love with the town’s cathedral. I went there every day. Researched its past. Looked at the inside and the outside, watched the tourists and town people walk in, walk out, or walk by.
While walking through the city, I always had my analogue camera and some film with me. Experimenting with long term exposure that was to imitate our sensual memory’s ability to hold information for about 3 seconds, I took photos of many sights I passed. My favourite subject still was the cathedral, though.
The first part of the work captures the different kinds of lights inside the cathedral.
The second part is directly linked to the cathedral’s past. During WWI most of Amiens was destroyed. So I captured parts of the cathedral’s front in several photographs and sewed them back together to show the healing process that still remembers the wounds.
From ‘the War Illustrated’ 7th September, 1918 ‘Amiens in Its Darkest Hour’: The German Offensive. —As the weeks of bombardment grew in number the signs of German fury became more plain. The cathedral, happily, suffered little. A small hole in the roof, some stained window glass broken, a buttress broken, the interior damaged here and there; nothing which cannot be repaired. But it will be a long time before the central part of Amiens is built up again. There are blocks in which not a building has escaped. Blackened by fire, scarred by shell-bursts, hundreds of beautiful old structures have been turned into heaps of charred timber, shattered brickwork, or mere dust.
