FRONTIÈRES (2024)
archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle 100% cotton photo rag
archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle 100% cotton photo rag
EN / FR
FRONTIÈRES explores the anthropology of migration, the arbitrary nature of borders, and the ecology of war through a series of photographs that retrace the the steps of Holocaust survivor Iby Knill, who crawled on her stomach through frozen fields in 1941 to escape the Nazis. In these images, ephemeral red dotted lines indicate the once heavily guarded border between former Czechoslovakia and Hungary, but the passage of time and the tilling of fields have all but brushed the landscape clean—nowadays, one would never know such a tangible danger had ever existed. The bucolic hum of the insects, the faraway barking of dogs, and the rustling of the lush vegetation mask an invisible history, blanketing and settling over the past like a fresh layer of soil.
What happens to narratives for which topographical evidence no longer exists to the naked eye? Are the mental geographies of memory, loss, and reconstruction axiomatically lost following their worldly decomposition? Perhaps, in order to perceive the lingering presence of sensitive histories, it is necessary to sit with the spaces devoid of any visible markers; to behold great swaths of absence, to listen quietly as they breathe their hollow witness.
FRONTIÈRES explores the anthropology of migration, the arbitrary nature of borders, and the ecology of war through a series of photographs that retrace the the steps of Holocaust survivor Iby Knill, who crawled on her stomach through frozen fields in 1941 to escape the Nazis. In these images, ephemeral red dotted lines indicate the once heavily guarded border between former Czechoslovakia and Hungary, but the passage of time and the tilling of fields have all but brushed the landscape clean—nowadays, one would never know such a tangible danger had ever existed. The bucolic hum of the insects, the faraway barking of dogs, and the rustling of the lush vegetation mask an invisible history, blanketing and settling over the past like a fresh layer of soil.
What happens to narratives for which topographical evidence no longer exists to the naked eye? Are the mental geographies of memory, loss, and reconstruction axiomatically lost following their worldly decomposition? Perhaps, in order to perceive the lingering presence of sensitive histories, it is necessary to sit with the spaces devoid of any visible markers; to behold great swaths of absence, to listen quietly as they breathe their hollow witness.
