New York, 2020

Today, more than half of the world's population lives in cities. Since 2015 I have been portraying different metropolises in the form of moving collages/ videos. All city portraits are created in cooperation with inhabitants and visitors in order to capture the multifaceted nature and complex history of a city. Using my own and other peoples photographs, I create moving collages that invite the viewer on an imaginary walk. The videos lead us through public and private spaces, through different seasons and epochs, showing us places of everyday life and famous monuments. As layer by layer the architectural, social and cultural diversity of a city unfolds, the different perspectives of the project’s participants merge. Each of my city portraits is a homage to the respective city, a portable museum, a postcard sent to no one in particular and everyone at once.

For the video about New York I have combined footage from 5 decades. The oldest images are analogue black and white photographs from the 1970s, the latest are mobile phone snapshots from 2019. Working with other people’s photographs is interesting to me because it proves how differently people perceive and appropriate a city. For tourists it is almost mandatory to take photographs of famous sights like the Manhattan skyline, Times Square and scenes from museums or Chinatown. Residents of the city in turn photograph everyday situations with friends, their neighborhoods and apartments. While residents and visitors come and go cities are constantly evolving. The structure of the video illustrates this constant process of deconstruction and new construction to which New York, just as other metropolises of the world, is subjected.