K071, 2018
When The Power Has Gone ( 2018/2024)
https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11967066
Since 1984, the Stasi card index system was organised in K071 paternoster cabinets, type KGII 303. Operated by an integrated electric motor, the cabinets allowed rapid access to the card files used to record, store and retrieve information.
Around 5,700 different indexes containing approximately 41 million card files have been preserved.
I photographed the paternoster cabinets in the Stasi archive, focusing on their repetitive structures, compartments and mechanisms. Removed from the individual information once contained within them, the cabinets become physical forms of the archive itself.
The photographs shift the focus from the contents of the files to the structure that held them. Rows of compartments, repeated surfaces and mechanical organisation suggest a system designed to make information accessible, sortable and retrievable.
The cabinet is both an object and part of an information system. What remains today is the physical structure of a mechanism through which countless individual lives were recorded and organised.
Up to 20 plates, 100 × 70 cm each
https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11967066
Since 1984, the Stasi card index system was organised in K071 paternoster cabinets, type KGII 303. Operated by an integrated electric motor, the cabinets allowed rapid access to the card files used to record, store and retrieve information.
Around 5,700 different indexes containing approximately 41 million card files have been preserved.
I photographed the paternoster cabinets in the Stasi archive, focusing on their repetitive structures, compartments and mechanisms. Removed from the individual information once contained within them, the cabinets become physical forms of the archive itself.
The photographs shift the focus from the contents of the files to the structure that held them. Rows of compartments, repeated surfaces and mechanical organisation suggest a system designed to make information accessible, sortable and retrievable.
The cabinet is both an object and part of an information system. What remains today is the physical structure of a mechanism through which countless individual lives were recorded and organised.
Up to 20 plates, 100 × 70 cm each
