“The project seeks an examination on the concept of home. I accompany my mother's return to the place where she grew up: a farm in southern Germany. In the confrontation of an idealizing view and the distance from the actual place today, tensions between familiarity and strangeness, constancy and change become visible. They clarify how home and origin can both carry and constrict.
The farming dynasty of my maternal family has existed for several generations. In the sixties, the farm was moved away from the village center and rebuilt in the surrounding area by my grandparents. My mother and her five siblings were heavily involved, as the farm had to be managed all the more intensively to remain profitable due to its small size. It was the last generation in which it could still be run successfully.
The journey to the farm can be seen on the one hand as a retrospective, on the other hand as a recording of the present and the material disappearance of my mother's home. For her, it is the final recording of the place where she was born and grew up. The change in view of the time there, which goes hand in hand with aging and spatial distance, is the core of the project.
The title is a quote from a letter from my mother to her parents, which I found by chance in the closet. In it she congratulates both of them on their birthday in 1999.
Then this evening I leafed through a picture book that is about the Sermon on the Mount. On the cover is a sunset that looks like it's over the Hardwäldle towards the Sonnenberg.
The title of the book is “Manchmal ist der Himmel über uns oen” (Sometimes the sky is open above us) - and then it came to me spontaneously - how far open must the sky have been when it brought you together? I think very far.”
