There are people who have minds that meticulously remember things that happened years ago – down to the specific wording, intonation, gesturing, and exactly which clothes everybody wore, or what the weather was like, or if the coffee had tasted good on that very morning. Then there are people who have a hard time even remembering how to spell their middle names – one of the reasons why I have chosen to go minimal on this one myself.
My memory is a syth, which is why I spend fortunes on books and also one of the resaons why I love photography, as a form of visual note taking.
Once in a while things grab me and I just know I need to keep them SOMEHOW – keep the memory, keep the feeling that went with it. Every event, like a christmas tree, is hanging full of interwoven and interlaced memories … So while I walk, I try to plant a trail of these trees along my path … in order not to forget.
While the Kursk drama unfolded, I was getting ready for my architecture diploma, getting ready for my first one man painting exhibition in a small museum, moving from a comfortable life into a menacing new environement, seeing my father very sick with enourmous fears of loosing him this early … When I see the Kursk images it all comes back to me: the smell of specific rooms in my old appartment, the colors of light and shadows on the walls, textures of food and fear in my mouth, the suffocating feeling, the pain in my stomach that prevented me from eating for 3 weeks, the sweat, the uncertainty of a future like a dark, massive wall in front of me, which was mirrored in the sickly greenish images of the broken tv screen – the online drama interwoven with my emotional and real life at that specific moment, not to ever be separated again.
Far, far away in the Barents Sea the Russian submarine K-141 Kurst sank, taking with it 118 lifes, leaving behind so much grief, disbelief and despair among people I have never met. And I, not seemingly connected with the drama, will never forget.
The project’s exhibition at the Bernd Slutzky Gallery:
The project’s merchandising:
“Kursk” is a non-profit project.
The Kursk Drama
Some definitions, facts and figures: Wikipedia
Back to projects
