Berlin

These images are from a series of 43 hand embroidered photographs following the entire circumference of the Berlin Wall.

These images are from a series of 43 hand-sewn photographs that were taken along the entire roughly 100 mile circumference of the former Berlin Wall. Sections of the photographs have been obscured by cross-stitch embroidery sewn directly into the photograph. The embroidery is made to resemble pixels and borrows the visual language of digital imaging in an analog, tactile process. In many images, the embroidered sections represent the exact scale and location of the former Wall offering a pixelated view of what lies behind. In this way, the embroidery both reveals and conceals the wall and appears as a translucent trace or ghost in the landscape of something that no longer exists but is a weight on history and memory. I am interested in the porous nature of memory and how photography transforms our understanding of the past. By referencing the aesthetics of pixelization, a connection is being made between forgetting and file corruption.

 

Often the embroidered sections of the image run along the horizon line forming an unnatural separation that blocks the viewer. This aspect of the sewing emphasizes the unnatural boundaries created by the wall itself. The images were taken in the city center as well as the outskirts of city where I followed the former path of the wall through suburbs and forests. In many places, no visible traces of the actual wall but subtle clues of its previous existence can be seen such as incongruities in the architecture or newer vegetation. In other locations along the path of the former wall, remnants of the city’s painful past were intentionally left in place to serve as a warning to future generations to not repeat the past.