German Landscapes Revisited consists of 80 slide frames, reassembled from found holiday slides of the 1960s and early 1970s. These images showed precisely the landscapes that shaped my own childhood: Berchtesgaden, the Rhine valley, forests, hills, postcard views. Places where one would position a child in front of a scenery so that a memory might come into being.

Encountering these slides decades later, I felt an immediate familiarity — a return to a specific, domesticated vision of Germany: orderly, idyllic, almost archetypal. Instead of preserving the images in their nostalgic integrity, I decided to dismantle them. I cut the photographs apart, separating skies from mountains, paths from rivers, figures from landscapes. From these fragments I assembled new pictorial spaces that no longer locate what “Germany” once meant in these images.

The works are therefore not to be read as single “timeslices” — not as frozen moments captured by a holiday photographer — but as condensations of multiple layers: several places, several times, several memories converging within a single montage. Perhaps this structure comes closer to what memory actually is: not a static image, but a brief inner film that unfolds for a few seconds — in overlaps, cuts, and shifts.

German Landscapes Revisited thus examines stereotypical notions of German landscapes and asks: Are these reconstructed views still landscapes? Are they still German? Or does the process of dismantling and rearranging them produce an entirely different image — one shaped as much by personal recollection as by collective imagination? The series was first shown in 2019 at the Annual Exhibition of Lübeck Artists at Schuppen 6.

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