Hated and Loved - Between the failure of socialism and the illusions of capitalism (2024 - Ongoing)
The German Democratic Republic, known as the GDR in English and the DDR in German, no longer exists, but it endures in landscapes, in scars, and in the hearts of those who once called it home. An absent country that lives on in memory.
It was a country hated and loved in equal measure: hated for its walls, its surveillance, its limits on freedom, and loved for its sense of belonging, for its solidarity, for the lives and dreams it contained.
To photograph the DDR is to follow the traces of something that has disappeared but remains visible. The borders are gone, but they are still present in architecture, in economy, in politics, and in the choices of those who came after. In this absence we can see both failure and persistence, capitalism and socialism, both imagined as salvation, both unable to deliver what they promised.
This project looks into that deep hole between systems, into what remains when the ideologies fade but their traces still shape daily life.
