HINTERLAND
Kassel, London 2024- 2025
What happens when humanity fails to learn from its past?
What happens when violence returns — not as history, but as atmosphere?
HINTERLAND is a dual projection and photographic series about the persistence of history — about what happens when humanity fails to learn from its past. The First World War, the Second World War, the Shoah — and today once again a disturbing rise in antisemitism, violence, and global division.
The work was created in Kassel, my hometown and the city of the Brothers Grimm — and at the same time a site of significant arms production. Through a consciously fairy tale-like visual language, using symbols, animals, trials, and transformations, the work does not treat the past as a closed chapter but as a living field of resonance. “Once upon a time” becomes a test of the present. Fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood or Snow White, with their universal motifs of loss, transformation, and survival, form a cultural echo that extends far beyond childhood.
The animal figures do not appear as illustrations but as archetypal presences embodied by myself. The sheep stands for the defenseless, the hare for fear, the German shepherd for order and discipline, the goat for the tension between vitality and exclusion. They are physical manifestations, a living echo of cultural inscriptions.
The title HINTERLAND also refers to a space behind what is visible. Philosophically, it describes an inner terrain, a space of possibility in which memory, dream, and history intertwine. A space we must enter in order to understand what may be too close or too distant to remember.
At the center of the work is a dialogue with the life and work of photographer Gerty Deutsch. Starting from her images, I developed a cinematic language without archival material, working exclusively with newly created footage and self-written resistance songs.
Music in this work is not accompaniment but force. It emerges where words become fragile and carries memory forward when language reaches its limits.
HINTERLAND was conceived in 2025 as a commission for the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, as part of the exhibition 20/20: Lens of Her Own, which focused on pioneering women in photography. The work was developed in response to this curatorial framework but has not yet been publicly presented due to the political circumstances.
In addition, the film incorporates material shot in London with Holocaust survivors, extending the dialogue between personal testimony and collective memory. Starting from these encounters, I developed a cinematic language without archival material, working exclusively with newly created footage and self-written resistance songs.
With HINTERLAND, I was awarded the Golden Hercules at the Kasseler Dokfest.
HINTERLAND does not accuse. It creates resonance. In the very place where fairy tales were once collected, the question arises once more: what remains when the last witnesses fall silent?
Amid rupture, the work searches for humanity through the means of art.
