THE FEAR THEORIES

The Fear Theories is playing with history, memory and imagination.It‘s a labyrinth of irrationality. It's 7 years of material following my son that suffers from fear and panic attacks. My work is both research and practice, memory and construction. A constant appropriation. A never ending process.

On March 26th in 2005 I gave birth to my first son. It was that day

when my fear of becoming a mother turned into his fear of being a

child.

Seeing my son grow up, I figured out that he struggled with the same

anxieties that tortured me when I was his age. It was the fear of oblivion,

the fear of falling asleep - of sliding into the endless mist of

fiction.

I started photographing him until it became a strategy to battle his

anxiety and to understand my own past fears. I created a system to

construct an image or a memory that doesn‘t fade - a proof for the

own existence through a photograph became existential.

In my photographic archive I found images of him that asked for

emotional visibility more than a plain surface. Suddenly there was

this sleepless void that, through the years, questioned my practice

of photographing. I found parallels between his anxiety and my photographic practice.

I digged deeper into that topic to understand my impulse to observe

him with a camera and found myself confronted with the problem:

the image itself. The work started with the anxiety of a growing little

boy and opened a much wider discourse about the fear of ephemeral

moments and has it‘s base in a world that is as real as photography

can be.