to contain: to include, to collect, to control

For refugees and asylum seekers who arrive in Berlin, a settlement of container-like accommodations in an industrial area just outside of Berlin-Spandau functions as a central collection point. In this area, no (social) infrastructure is available either for adults or children. For the duration of their stay, people accommodated here are thus limited in their being to living within the walls of a container home. A temporary, so-called home: expulsion or transfer to another settlement or a private apartment may be the next step. Until their asylum case is processed, they live in limbo, in a vacuum-filled space.

Inspired by this issue as a political problem, the focus of my work is on the people who live in this situation, and who were willing to let me share their accommodation and their story. Twelve hours a day in a container home: every half hour, a photograph was taken from the same vantage point. A central motif is the question of how to view the suffering of others, without falling prey to superficial consumption. On the Basis of Empowerment the project therefore thrives on interaction with the residents, who stage their own lives: they reveal themselves in confrontation with or indifference to their living situation and their allocated living space. For some this becomes their personal refuge and free space; for others, the container-like home is a non-place with a restrictive function.

The moments captured oscillate between helplessness and self-help strategies, between an exceptional situation and everyday routine.

Photographic oil paintings are hypnotic. The patina of paint is like a false veil behind which lurks death: there is a sense of evasion, as when applying make-up to a corpse prior to viewing. It is a trans-vested genre where the subject is further removed from reality by an additional mask. The photographic image is thus disguised by a technical mixture, but the result is still a hybrid inspiring a particular symbolic tension: that which is intended to be hidden remains present, and what is feigned will never actually happen.

In theoretical terms, the process of ‘de-automation’ produced by the pictorial layer adds a certain distance to the otherwise immediate relationship between photographer and subject; it is a distance inherent to the aura which, according to Walter Benjamin, is experienced in the presence of unique works of art. But when we think about it in relation to death, as this was the traditional and ultimate purpose of the genre—it seems that the effect sought is quite different: an effort to draw the loved ones closer by disguising the loss, to bring the image back to life through the painting, and simultaneously, as the original context of the portrait vanishes over time, to endow the memory of the loved ones with an air of eternity. These characteristics are diametrically opposed to the essential death-time duality of photography as posed by Roland Barthes: the emphasis on death as something arising from the temporal characteristics of the photographic medium itself, or, in other words, the mechanical repetition ad infinitum of something that happened once and can never again be repeated in existential terms. This dichotomy is not resolved in photographic oil paintings, death and time remain suspended, but not entirely; they hang, ethereal, tightening the hypnotic wire of tension vibrating taut between photography and painting, instance and eternity, immediacy and distance, life and death.

Sacred immortality

It is true that as far as society goes, no middle-class family living in the first half of the 20th century in Argentina would have considered these issues when preparing to spend large amounts of money on photographic oil paintings. Their intention was undoubtedly to render homage to their loved ones with a tribute of some distinction (greater than a photographed portrait, but not as expensive as an original oil painting) and, on certain occasions, to ensure that the memory of the deceased continue present in their daily lives, to the point where the portrait was transformed into something far more than mere representation, imbued with something akin to sacred immortality.

I was covering a demonstration by Kenyan Muslims on January 15, 2010. After Friday prayer, the demonstrators demanded the release of the Jamaican cleric sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal.

The demonstration turned into a riot after riot police threw teargas to disperse the crowd. Shortly after, l was hit with a stone at the back of my head.

Abdullah al-Faisal, who is on a global terror watch list and served four years in a British jail for inciting racial hatred, has been in Kenyan custody since 1st January after Kenyan authorities tried and failed to deport him. He was finally deported on January 22nd.

Two people died and one policeman and four demonstrators were injured in the running battles blocking several main streets in Nairobi's central business district on January 15.