Public Passage#2, 2025

Fine Art-Print, 40 x 120 cm

My immediate surroundings provide me with a stage on which I engage—if you will—with the events, processes, and manifestations taking place within it, as well as with their photographic representation. My fundamental interest lies in our experience and perception of “place” and “movement.”

The photographic or cinematic sequence and its manipulation open up the possibility for me to assemble or deconstruct a subjectively constructed reality. As in my other photographic and filmic series, the staging in Public Passages only emerges in post-production.

In this series—much like in Public Scenes—the individual, who is outwardly defined above all by the face, is anonymized. This is achieved by replacing real faces with portraits of mannequins in post-production. In an era of AI-generated portraits, in which faces circulate without bodies, biographies, or lived time, this intervention appears both banal and highly contemporary.

In the sense of Jean Baudrillard, these figures exist in a state of simulacrum:

the portrait no longer refers to a real subject, but to an endless chain of images without origin. The face becomes a surface, a pure sign-form whose credibility is derived from its reproducibility.

Thus, Public Passages—not without an ironic inflection—raises the question of the interchangeability of the individual and the ritualized movements of everyday life. Public space becomes a stage of simulation, in which presence and absence, original and copy, are scarcely distinguishable.