Nachwelt – After Life
Cemeteries are not only sites of individual remembrance and personal mourning; they are also integral parts of the urban fabric, functioning as historical archives and ecological refuges. At the same time, they are aesthetic spaces that reflect the spirit of their time as well as social conditions of wealth and poverty. In Berlin—a city shaped equally by new beginnings, destruction, division, and reunification—cemeteries act as quiet witnesses to history. Layers of historical rupture and collective trauma can be read within them, ranging from the First World War and National Socialism to more recent transformations of the city. By examining these sites and translating them into an artistic context, the project opens up a dialogue on transience, individual and collective memory, and our ambivalent relationship to death—an incomprehensible natural phenomenon inevitably inscribed into human life.
NACHWELT is an art and book project developed over four years of photographic work on cemeteries across Berlin, in both the former East and West. Human figures are absent from the images, yet human presence remains palpable through traces and interventions. Alongside these traces, nature follows its own logic, reclaiming and animating spaces left behind by profound changes in burial practices over recent decades. The work makes visible contradictions in contemporary approaches to death: repression and incomprehension, but also banality, beauty, and moments of quiet absurdity. An idiosyncratic visual world emerges between flowers, grave ornaments, watering cans, columbarium walls, and war graves.
The project exists in two distinct yet complementary forms. The spatial installation presents photographs sublimated in high-gloss onto ultra-thin metal plates. Leaning against walls or standing freely in the space—recalling displaced or abandoned gravestones—the images are experienced at life scale, with a strong sense of material presence and spatial depth. In contrast, the artist book offers a fundamentally different mode of engagement. Its design is structured through fold-out pages and sequences that reveal and conceal both images and empty space. Rather than working at a one-to-one scale, the book allows narratives and relationships to unfold through image sequences, diptychs, and triptychs. The artist book is currently in development.
Aluminium Sublimation Prints, various sizes,
2025
2025
