Beyond the wild

The project started with a question: What is the reality of country life today - beyond glossy magazines with pretty gardens, beyond hearty recipes or farming sim games in the metaverse? Is it wild, taking care of itself, or just an easy escape from the pandemic and other crises?

In recent years, after life abroad in big cities, I have returned to my roots, the rural. Places, where I have personal ties, where I grew up as a child with a sense of adventure roaming around freely. This is rare today, the proportion of children regularly playing in wild places has fallen from over half to fewer than one in ten. I document my personal voyage of discovery - architecture, people, landscapes and the peculiarities of daily life. I discover the vernacular and ephemeral. In the age of anthropocene, some villages are deserted, others morph into suburbia. In Germany the number of people working on the land in 2020 was as small as 2%. I question the past and future of the rural, its fundamental transformation including environmental and sustainability issues. This affects us all personally and globally. The countryside is our livelihood, for me the central creative space, an area of conflict and collaboration between man and nature.

This project is an essential contribution to the current discussion on sustainability and safeguarding the future. I start with the perspective of those who deserve a future worth living - our children, who have less and less chances to directly play in nature. Since the 1970s the area in which children roam without supervision [in the UK] has decreased by almost 90 percent, while the proportion of children regularly playing in wild places has fallen from over half to fewer than one in ten.

I go back to my childhood, find the inner child in me and take it with me on this journey.

I approach the rural with open eyes, uninhibited and intuitive like a child, plus I add my thoughts that arise while walking. Thus I become a researching artist, an ethnographer, documenting what is vanishing. I look at the rural as if I had never seen it before, in complete freedom from pre-conceived concepts. That allows me to discover the unseen, the mundane and the humorous side of rural life. My photos carry patina, an aesthetic of nostalgia, an ambience evoking things past while foreboding the future. The future - a result of the free choices we make today.