Leichter als Luft Weltfahrten / (lighter than air world journeys)
A visual essay for the annual magazine of the Landesverband Bildende Kunst, Saxony: We dive in, we take off. Buckle up! We're off on a new journey into the Warburg universe. This has grown analogous to Marshall McLuhan's term of the Gutenberg Galaxy. My work is characterised by mostly found images: Images of collective memory whose contextual shifting through image combinations and analogies become image essays.
Aby Warburg's Picture Atlas Memnosyne sets a historical marker for the multidimensionality of the visual world as opposed to the one-dimensional linearity of linguistic narration and is the starting point for the present picture essay, which begins with a reproduction of the third panel of the Picture Atlas: images of planetary orbits, Mars and airships. I zoom in, out of the book, on the airship Graf Zeppelin, which was on a world tour in 1929. In that year Warburg presented his picture atlas for the first time. In the course of my essay, we will encounter airship travel and its myth-making through originals, stagings or interpretation.
2018