TRABANTEN

"Gropiusstadt, that's high-rises for 45,000 people, with lawns and shopping malls in between. From the outside everything looked new and very well-kept. But when you were between the skyscrapers, it stank of piss and shit everywhere. That came from the many dogs and the many children who lived in Gropiusstadt. It stank the most in the stairwells." This is how Christiane F. described the place where she grew up as a child in her famous story "Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo". With my work TRABANTEN I attempt to approach the myth of Gropiusstadt visually. A portrait along the photographic border between documentary realism and poetic subjectivity. What does it look like, the individual reality beyond the promise of more "light, air and sun"? In what does it become visible, the ambivalent attitude to life of this city, proudly cast in concrete over half a century ago and which is now seen to be failed. Does living in the large housing estate on the edge of the city also mean living on the edge of society? Since the 50th anniversary of Gropiusstadt in 2012, I have repeatedly portrayed the place and its residents. To get a little closer to them in the brief moment of the encounter. The surroundings are deliberately chosen. Not the flat as a private retreat but the public space planned on a drawing board. In the satellite-city on the outskirts of Berlin, where the hopes of modern life in the big city border on the sewage fields of Brandenburg.