Chalk on the board- photo book

A story about a young artist who moves to Berlin in search for her artistic vocation. In her first year, she is an urban nomad, living in a different flat every month, not having many belongings or material goods. Not only does she struggle with usual existential difficulties of an emigrant, but she is also continuously challenged by her own inner world. Digital color photographs were taken between 10.2009 and 09.2010 in Berlin and edited as a book in 2015. It is self-published in a limited series of 100 on a pearl photo-paper. If you wish to obtain a copy, please contact the author for more information.

Book preview:

Introduction to the book:

A foreign environment carries a kind of Utopian promise. You don’t know what exactly, but you sense it strongly enough to go and try to figure it out. So I left my cosy hometown for this “Unknown” in Berlin, Deutschland.

My personal utopia was to take the being as an experiment. Unclear as it sounds, but I really tried this and that and observed what came out. A digital camera, a sleeping bag, basic clothes in the backpack. They were my belongings. My body was the only shelter as my dwellings served rather as creative labs.

These temporary living- creating conditions, as I shall call them, triggered anxiety. Oh! it was like struggling through a room separated by infinite semi-transparent tissues: fantasies, opportunities, visions. So realistic, yet unattainable. I thought I could do anything I wanted. How liberating!

But some irrational rush stressed me out. Hurry! Hurry! I heard. No time to stop and look or think. Baam baam. I couldn’t breathe. Dyspnea. I had to dance? Or was I chased? By whom? By what?

Boredom was my rescue. It showed up like an apparition in an abandoned house. But doesn’t it always visit the one without duties or responsibilities, the one who wakes up and has to create their day from scratch, again and again, every day. Again and again…

For at such times there is no future nor past. Just the temporary, which for me lasted one year, or maybe still lasts..