Pankow_01
Abandoned Playground
Berlin is renowned for its positive qualities as well as its reputation for being dirty. Rather than merely perceiving the rubbish as a failure of the city, ‘Abandoned Playground’ approaches rubbish as the locus of everyday life. It inverts the relationship that we generally form with rubbish, transforming the excluded and uncanny into the subject of art. By focusing on the liminal space between rubbish and the street, I am trying to create a space for negotiation between these two.
The foundation of my project lies in the photographs I capture during walks in gentrified areas or sites in the danger of gentrification such as Wedding, Moabit, Pankow, Neukölln, and Kreuzberg where the concept of "rubbish emerges as a form of urban exclusion. To highlight this exclusion, I focus on groups of objects that are abandoned in the city and photograph them. Then I edit the photos by using digital tools, firstly, to accentuate the contrast between what is considered the waste and the city; secondly, to create a new ‘whole’, from that isolated part, to let abandoned objects invade the fabric of urban reality. This process helped me to turn my practice into a counterattack to our understanding of hygiene and the exclusion of what is regarded as rubbish.
Wedding_01
Neukölln_01
Neukölln_02
