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Florian Schwarz, aus/from: wohinundzurück, Video-Loop, 10 min (2007)
Florian Schwarz
wohinundzurück

November 6  - December 5, 2008
»The series and book-project wohinundzurück is the visual diary of a journey along the route my late grandfather took in World War II. After months of research, I had reconstructed his time as an infantryman and as a prisoner in a Russian POW camp all the way to a city called Asbest in western Siberia, from where he returned in 1947.«

wohinundzurück is a voyage through time and space, past and present as well as private and public history and, at the same time, a road movie about the monotony of many thousands of kilometres, about weariness, doubts and frustration, about sentiment and cruelty and about being alone with time and silence.
This sequence of pictures by Florian Schwarz has the drawn out suspense of a road movie; but it’s a journey back into (German) history, in search of lost time, and also, most likely, in search of personal roots. At the same time, this series has a lot to tell us – in the spaces that separate the images – about the complex relationship between photography and memory. Reflecting Schwarz’ connection to a dark, desolate past, this photo-montage is a truly personal project, motivated by the desire to understand what happened and what one is to make of it.

Florian Schwarz (*1979 Konstanz/Bodensee, D) studied from 2003 to 2007 photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He lives and works in Berlin and in Konstanz.

www.florian-schwarz.net