HINTERLAND
2024–2025
Hinterland is a German word that at first sounds unremarkable. It refers to the land behind the coast, behind the city, behind what is visible. In philosophy, it stands for what lies beyond the immediately tangible – an inner place, a space of possibility, something not yet understood but already sensed. Our own hinterland: that which we cannot yet remember because it is either too near or too far.
In Kassel, my home, the word is closely tied to the Brothers Grimm. Here they collected and wrote down fairy tales that became some of the most famous in the world. Stories like Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, or Hansel and Gretel travelled from here across Europe, crossed oceans, and found their way into countless books, stage plays, and films – even to Hollywood. Their motifs are as present in popular culture as in literature, and have long since become part of a global visual language.
Our own Hinterland: What we cannot yet remember, because it is either too close or too distant. What surrounds us before we have words for it.
HINTERLAND
2024–2025
Hinterland is a dual video projection about memory, repression, and the repeating patterns of society. At its core lies a dialogue with the work and biography of photographer Gerty Deutsch – a visual-poetic reflection on the question: What happens when history does not repeat itself, but continues to write itself – barely visible, yet deeply felt?
“Once upon a time” becomes a measure of the present. The language of fairy tales – with their repetitions, trials, and transformations – intersects with the reality of a city I live in. A city from which over a thousand Jewish people were deported, shaped by a past that has not passed.
This work does not offer answers. It does not document – it holds. Through the rhythm of the seasons, a cinematic field unfolds between light and shadow, presence and absence. The lyricism of the images stands in contrast to the weight of recorded silence.
All scenes, sounds, and compositions were developed independently – without archival material. What emerges is an artistic position that doesn’t appeal pacifistically, but observes precisely – and in this, becomes political.
Hinterland was created intentionally outside institutional spaces – in a place where fairy tales were once collected and passed on to children around the world. And it is here that the deeper question arises: What remains when the last witnesses of the Holocaust fall silent – and silence continues to resonate? Hinterland engages with a Zeitgeist in which memory is dissolving – and antisemitic thought patterns once again gain traction, not in hiding, but outspoken, structured, and socially acceptable.
