1. Forgotten Doctrine, since 2024 Work in progress
Forgotten Doctrine ( 2025)
https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/12469851-forgotten-doctrine
As the Berlin Wall recedes into history, the lived realities of dictatorship fade, overshadowed by nostalgia. Surveillance, control, and the suppression of dissent lose urgency, while younger generations inherit fragmented accounts that fail to convey the regime’s impact.
In Forgotten Doctrine, artefacts are not treated as static records. I manipulate, obscure, and reframe them—activating memory through disruption rather than preservation.
Working from the UK—a position of both distance and dislocation—I approach these remnants of my past as both subject and observer. Materials such as negatives, schoolbooks, badges, medals, shell casings, and propaganda fragments undergo irreversible transformation: folded, buried in ash or emulsion, encased in resin, or embedded in clay. These acts both preserve and obscure, acknowledging ideological residue while disrupting readability. Photography extends this transformation. Surfaces are abstracted, textures heightened, context erased.
Weißer Regen reflects personal nostalgia and ideological conflict through erased Soviet book pages and projected civil defence slides. In Faux Diamonds, black-and-white negatives of my students—taken just before my forced reassignment in 1989—are sealed in resin. The resulting photographs in Pavlov’s Children reveal and obscure these embedded forms. History Overwritten layers multiple portraits, dissolving individual identity into collective mass. Friedenskinder I, inspired by Reiner Kunze’s banned story about childhood militarisation, places hand-copied text inside spent rifle casings. Friedenskinder II arranges military insignia in formation, with chalkboards listing the names of 140 people who died at the Berlin Wall. In Counting the Tanks, medals of honour and loyalty are embedded in ash, clay, and emulsion. Their symbolic weight is levelled in enlarged photographs—questioning how militarised ideology is seeded in childhood.
Despite the evidence of the past 35 years, memory distorts. In today’s East Germany, nostalgia often replaces complexity with comforting myths. I’m drawn to that gap—between what we remember and what we lived. Forgotten Doctrine inhabits that space, where personal history, collective forgetting, and ideological residue collide.
https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/12469851-forgotten-doctrine
As the Berlin Wall recedes into history, the lived realities of dictatorship fade, overshadowed by nostalgia. Surveillance, control, and the suppression of dissent lose urgency, while younger generations inherit fragmented accounts that fail to convey the regime’s impact.
In Forgotten Doctrine, artefacts are not treated as static records. I manipulate, obscure, and reframe them—activating memory through disruption rather than preservation.
Working from the UK—a position of both distance and dislocation—I approach these remnants of my past as both subject and observer. Materials such as negatives, schoolbooks, badges, medals, shell casings, and propaganda fragments undergo irreversible transformation: folded, buried in ash or emulsion, encased in resin, or embedded in clay. These acts both preserve and obscure, acknowledging ideological residue while disrupting readability. Photography extends this transformation. Surfaces are abstracted, textures heightened, context erased.
Weißer Regen reflects personal nostalgia and ideological conflict through erased Soviet book pages and projected civil defence slides. In Faux Diamonds, black-and-white negatives of my students—taken just before my forced reassignment in 1989—are sealed in resin. The resulting photographs in Pavlov’s Children reveal and obscure these embedded forms. History Overwritten layers multiple portraits, dissolving individual identity into collective mass. Friedenskinder I, inspired by Reiner Kunze’s banned story about childhood militarisation, places hand-copied text inside spent rifle casings. Friedenskinder II arranges military insignia in formation, with chalkboards listing the names of 140 people who died at the Berlin Wall. In Counting the Tanks, medals of honour and loyalty are embedded in ash, clay, and emulsion. Their symbolic weight is levelled in enlarged photographs—questioning how militarised ideology is seeded in childhood.
Despite the evidence of the past 35 years, memory distorts. In today’s East Germany, nostalgia often replaces complexity with comforting myths. I’m drawn to that gap—between what we remember and what we lived. Forgotten Doctrine inhabits that space, where personal history, collective forgetting, and ideological residue collide.