ABOUT

The ter­rain that Laurenz Berges pati­ently explo­red in Duisburg over the past few years is com­pa­ra­ble to the fore­go­ing descrip­tion of the Ruhr district’s deeply sea­ted com­mu­nal misery. He mainly kept to the quar­ters that were for­merly sites of heavy indus­try and are now suf­fe­ring the most from the effects of struc­tu­ral change. A gene­ral decline in the qua­lity of urban life is obvious. These pho­to­graphs never attempt to por­tray con­crete exam­ples of social mal­de­ve­lop­ment, howe­ver. Berges is instead inte­res­ted in how to make the things in the image speak in order to ren­der under­stan­da­ble a dimen­sion of expe­ri­ence: inte­ri­ors, archi­tec­tu­ral details, frag­ments of nature, a per­son here and there. Berges’s mode of work is indi­rect. His pho­to­graphs create a par­al­lel rea­lity that trans­cends details and seeks a holistic visual effect all the more emphatically.

In Duisburg he found images of a void that is fil­led with a fun­da­men­tal silence. A fee­ling of for­lorn­ness and dis­ori­en­ta­tion seems to lie over the city, a con­di­tion known as bardo in Buddhism: that is to say, a tran­si­tio­nal state bet­ween death and rebirth. This explains the uni­que inten­sity of the visual effect. Light and silence are its mes­sen­gers. Soft day­light fills the rooms, inside and out, with an int­an­gi­ble volume. The matte appearance of the colors inten­si­fies their effect because they are no lon­ger a super­fi­cial mani­fes­ta­tion, but cor­po­real instead. They almost seem to sink into the image sur­face. There is an unhur­ried­ness of obser­va­tion inherent in these pic­tures that com­mu­ni­ca­tes its­elf to the viewer. Life in its puta­tive flee­ting­ness is brought to a halt and attains ful­fill­ment in ubiety.

— Heinz Liesbrock