5. When The Power Has Gone 2018/2024
When The Power Has Gone ( 2018/2024)
https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11967066
When The Power Has Gone brings together photographic works developed from materials I retrieved from personal and public archives relating to my life in the GDR.
Born in the 1960s, I lived and worked in Berlin until 1992. The materials I returned to include my Stasi file, coded lists of Stasi employees, photographs, film rolls, texts and objects connected to the systems of surveillance, education and control that surrounded everyday life.
The archive became a way of encountering parts of my own past that had been recorded independently of my memory. In 1997, I applied to see the files the Ministry for State Security had kept on me. The documents contained correspondence, index cards and information gathered through the opening and monitoring of my mail. Other materials came from public archives and from objects and images that I had kept myself.
Rather than treating these materials as documents to be reproduced, I began to alter and transform them. In File 1214/87, I worked with facsimiles of my own Stasi file. In Beyond Orwell, formerly secret information about the surveillance of citizens was translated into three-dimensional forms. Die wunderbaren Jahre uses deconstructed film rolls containing my hand-copied writing from forbidden East German authors. In Archiving Power, coded lists of Stasi employees are tranformed. K071 photographs the paternoster cabinets containing the Stasi card index system.
Across the works, information is repeatedly moved from one form into another. Documents become images, images become objects, text becomes material, and systems of information become visual structures. The original material remains the starting point, but its appearance, accessibility and function change.
The historical and autobiographical circumstances remain embedded in the material, but my attention is drawn increasingly to what happens when an existing document or object is physically and visually transformed.
This body of work began my continuing interest in the relationship between preservation and transformation. What happens to something when it is removed from its original context? What remains when information is altered, obscured or reorganised? And how can an archive be encountered not only as evidence of the past, but as material that can still be worked with?
https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11967066
When The Power Has Gone brings together photographic works developed from materials I retrieved from personal and public archives relating to my life in the GDR.
Born in the 1960s, I lived and worked in Berlin until 1992. The materials I returned to include my Stasi file, coded lists of Stasi employees, photographs, film rolls, texts and objects connected to the systems of surveillance, education and control that surrounded everyday life.
The archive became a way of encountering parts of my own past that had been recorded independently of my memory. In 1997, I applied to see the files the Ministry for State Security had kept on me. The documents contained correspondence, index cards and information gathered through the opening and monitoring of my mail. Other materials came from public archives and from objects and images that I had kept myself.
Rather than treating these materials as documents to be reproduced, I began to alter and transform them. In File 1214/87, I worked with facsimiles of my own Stasi file. In Beyond Orwell, formerly secret information about the surveillance of citizens was translated into three-dimensional forms. Die wunderbaren Jahre uses deconstructed film rolls containing my hand-copied writing from forbidden East German authors. In Archiving Power, coded lists of Stasi employees are tranformed. K071 photographs the paternoster cabinets containing the Stasi card index system.
Across the works, information is repeatedly moved from one form into another. Documents become images, images become objects, text becomes material, and systems of information become visual structures. The original material remains the starting point, but its appearance, accessibility and function change.
The historical and autobiographical circumstances remain embedded in the material, but my attention is drawn increasingly to what happens when an existing document or object is physically and visually transformed.
This body of work began my continuing interest in the relationship between preservation and transformation. What happens to something when it is removed from its original context? What remains when information is altered, obscured or reorganised? And how can an archive be encountered not only as evidence of the past, but as material that can still be worked with?