Heimat, eine intime Verortung /Home, intime place

 

Es gibt eine Heimat? (is there Home?)

 

Herbert in Julio Wolff is my grandfather.

He was a soldier in World War II. This has left him a condensed eternal scar on loss, abandonment, loneliness and fear.

 

After my grandmother died, my grandfather began sharing family memories. The story of his life, my father, running away to Argentina. I understood the concept of being "grandchildren of war" as a genetic and historic legend all the grandchildren of Germans who lived this dramatic war inherit.

 

The memories in my grandfather began to fade and include me. Perhaps I began to feel a foreigner in my own place. I used his words to register my emotional states.

 

Who am I in this story?

 

I stopped thinking only about his story ...

 

Each instance in my project connected these two worlds intertwined: Germany, Argentina; Argentina,  Germany. The experience started reformulating the essence of the project and the reality of its conception. There was a crush.

 

This breakdown made me investigate the threads that connect the time of my grandfather, my parents and me. All times and spaces that have fluctuated in the intrinsic connection between two countries, two cultures and an ocean of doubts and questions in the middle.

 

The work aims to find the natural connection between the links beneath us, our personal memory. Memory transfer.

 

Self-reference involves fighting what is beyond imagination. Who am I in this interpellation?

I could have been German. This statement also implies a denial. The verb "could" confuses a present that is not, and a past that could have been.

If there is no home, there is no shelter. But occasionally, that home is the personal construction of the space imagined by the subject. It may be an invention or reality. That home space provides the necessary safety and release.

This photo project aims to outline a search for that imaginary place, eine Heimat.