The title of my work “Fremd bin ich eingezogen” (“I arrived as a stranger”) makes direct reference to Franz Schubert’s song cycle “Winterreise” from the year 1827. The opening words “As a stranger I arrived here, as a stranger I go hence” became the creative starting point for my photography journey taking me through my own biography and the absurdity of the contemporary world during the ongoing decade which is connected with far-reaching changes in European history. I photographed refugees from Africa, who are waiting in camps in Austria for permission to stay in EU. Loneliness and internal exile, alienation and exclusion, displacement, transience and failure are existential questions not only for refugees also for us. Therefore it is a special concern for me to deal with the differences of immigration and emigration and travel (which is inherent from the Latin verb “migrare”) and the positive tension between European history and the aesthetics of landscape and portrait photography and to question and visualize it repeatedly.
