Concept

Cumulative time: In a composing of 3D laser point cloud, digital photography as well as a historical photograph from 1950, the largest industrial ruin in Thuringia is portrayed.

The AWE [formerly VEB Automobilwerk Eisenach] was a plant with a long tradition of automobile production in Thuringia. Only a few original buildings remain on the former factory site, including the so-called "O1," the largest industrial monument in Thuringia. Is it a monument? As a ruin, it is a clear, radical sign next to otherwise intact streetscapes and new development areas. In any case, the facade still shows something: the will to preserve (at least) the facades, in order to perhaps be able to create something new behind them later. The facade floats in the present, robbed of its original identity, and at the same time remains between the past and the future. The sovereignty of interpretation remains open: Is the façade a bearer of hope, a multi-layered object of speculation, or a symbol of change?

At the beginning of the 21st century, massive structural changes are emerging in industrialized societies. They do not always receive as much attention as the automobile industry, which for a century has been a sign of prosperity, progress, economic upswing and regarded as an economic engine.

MDR interviewed me on November 29, 2021: read the online article.

Five aspects to the work:
Automobile
The building "O1" becomes the symbol of a moving society that has come to a temporary standstill in front of the ruins of its own decisions in the midst of change. What shines today?

Time
What is sought is a linking of like with like. It is a matching of patterns that are known or experienced anew.

historical context
What would it mean if the building "O1" was demolished?
Time, memory and the transience of this man-made and long-forgotten building are considered within an artistic framework. Supplemented by portraits of people who worked here or decided on its future. The portrayed stand in imaginary 3×3 meter squares and show themselves with the three-word address associated with the location, which was stretched across the globe as a worldwide map (https://what3words.com). Regardless of what will happen to the "O1" building, the global coordinate network of three-word addresses will continue. It is planned to repeat these portraits after years at the same locations as far as the new building use allows.

Archive footage
Using the image material from the museum archives, identical or approximate perspectives are photographed as much as possible. The intended result: to show a frozen window of time, juxtaposed, merged or superimposed.

Architecture
What is the fascination with these sites abandoned by man? Why are we so preoccupied with them in the media? How broken does something have to be for it to be considered a ruin, or is it always the absence of man that marks ruins in the first place? What visual impulse must the ruin have so that we do not pass it by carelessly?
When looking at the ruin, one is often anxious to undo it.

There should be no indifferent aestheticization of neglected architecture.

Working method
When working with and in the abandoned building, not only photography is used. The potential of a 3D laser scanner was used to explore unfamiliar views with a tracking shot. Walls and roofs are traversed in the process - creating a poetry of its own of the lightness of this huge steel construct.
This was completed by a dance film shot in the spring of 2022.

... virtually inhaled, scanned and measured the building, from top to bottom, from back and front.
Jensen Zlotowicz in the Thüringer Allgemeine of March 28, 2020