The Blue Skies Project (w/ Anton Kusters)
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The Blue Skies Project (w/ Anton Kusters) 〰️
The Blue Skies Project (with Anton Kusters) - ONGOING
Exhibitions:
V&A Museum, London
Arles (F) July 4 - Aug 29 2021
C-Mine Genk (B) Mar 13 - May 30, 2021
Landskrona (SW) Sep 4-20, 2020
The Photographers Gallery, London - Feb 21 - Jun 7, 2020
Nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2020
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington DC), ongoing
Fitzrovia Chapel / Photo London - May 14-19, 2019
FORMAT19, UK - March 15 - April 14, 2019
Asheville, US, Photo+Sphere - November 1st, 2018
Getxophoto, ES - September 5 - September 30, 2018
International Center of Photography NYC - April 19, 2018
Press selection:
Eighty-seven years ago, Nazi Germany succeeded in creating an institutionalized industrial system to use up, deplete, and ultimately obliterate human beings. Over the course of 13 years this materialized in many shapes and forms, with the SS concentration camp system at its core and Operation Reinhardt and the extermination camps as its ultimate, extreme, incomprehensible act.
Prompted by the story of his grandfather who narrowly escaped deportation in 1943, Kusters spent 6 years researching and photographing a blue sky at the last known location of every former nazi Germany concentration camp and killing center across Europe. More than a thousand SS concentration camps existed in a highly organized system of imprisonment, forced labor, and murder.
In the resulting work, these 1078 images of blue skies collectively bear witness to the systematic trauma that was happening below. They are all blind-stamped with identification numbers and GPS coordinates, and represent the paradox of the sky as a witness, inextricably linked to every victim, both those that perished as those that survived.
The element of time by Ruben Samama
In dialogue with the images, a 4432 day-long generative sound piece by Ruben Samama gives a non-descriptive single tone, a voice to every victim, in real-time, bringing back everything to a personal, individual level. ‘To be able to empathize with each others trauma, it is important to strip the trauma from the hierarchy we attached to it, be it for political reasons, newsworthiness or ‘shock value’, the abstraction of the sounding tones and the singular exposure have as a function to enable the visitor to imagine, empathize for themselves, grasp the enormity of the devastation, and look at loss as a human, inclusive aspect of life. If we want the memory of the horrific events past to remain in the conscious mind of future generations, we need people to be able to connect, whether the trauma happened to their ‘tribe’, so to speak, or not, to understand and experience in an inclusive manner will most possibly be the way forward, to collectively heal and prevent a repetition of historical events.’
…When Samama’s piece was played at a conference lasting several hours in a New York museum, by the time the discussion ended an enormous number of people had died in the parallel universe of the Holocaust created by this installation; one could ask for an exact count of the victims. Afterwards one has only to turn on the news to realize that certain horrors continue that are contemporaneous with our existence today—one may think of Syrian refugees in boats, or of people and trees in the Amazon forest, or of Uighur Muslims in massive Chinese detention camps.
(Excerpt from an essay by Fred Ritchin)
The Blue Skies project is curated by Monica Allende
Software Development by Danny de Graan
