Part I – The Moose on the Ice

In my family projections play an important role. My father’s and my mother’s side stranded in West-Germany. I grew up surrounded by dialects, stories and places that didn’t appear elsewhere. I am looking into these present projections onto the past.

The moose on the Ice, 2004, photo montage, 60 x 40 cm

I go for the first time to Lithuania, where my grandfather grew up. I put a moose on an ice floe drifting on the river Nemunas.

The goal was to stage an image the grandfather described many times: In late winter, when the ice on the river Nemunas melted, he saw a moose drifting on an ice floe, bellowing in fear.

This image made a strong impression. It has become a metaphor for the personal entanglement of a man who, during the first half of the 20th century, made decisions that continue to have an effect on his family today. Having something, losing it again, finding a place – these continue to be critical themes for the family to this day.

In searching for my “own” place, which has nothing to do with Lithuania and yet is inseparably connected to the family’s history, I worked to realize this image in Lithuania in January 2005.

I had never been to Lithuania before, yet the land, the mentality and the landscape were strangely familiar to me as a result of the stories told by the grandfather, who died in 1990.

On my first trip I wanted to investigate this projected feeling of “homeland” (Heimat), the grandfather’s biography and thus a part of my own identity.

“The Moose on the Ice” (Part 1) was sponsored by the Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen