Lines of Resistance:
Body of work comprising of a short film and two composite photographic panoramas.
Video: 6m 22s
Lines of Resistance is filmed at the Berlin Wall Memorial, a preserved and sealed section of the former wall and death strip which divided East and West Berlin during the Cold War. The memorial remains to memorialise those who died trying to get from the Eastern sector to the Western sector and provides a history of the wall and its consequences.
The film, informed by the narration of tour guides and visitors comments, explores their interaction with and reactions to the memorial and considers the space as a site of control. The wall presents a brutal and barren environment illustrating a bleak history, which is disrupted by the arrival of colorful, enthusiastic and intrigued tourists. This disjuncture and sometimes humorous and clumsy encounter forces us to question how we navigate, consume and reflect upon these sites of human tragedy.
The panoramas were made using a Gigapan, technology developed by Google and NASA to take extremely high resolution images of Mars using remote control. Forensics have adapted the use of this technology for use at crime scenes, the detail of these images allow forensic scientists to zoom into the image and uncover evidence which might not be apparent to the naked eye.
Chausseestrasse
The image spans the old and new materials of state surveillance, the remnants of the now overgrown and deteriorated death strip on the left of the image and the potential of the new building on the right. As I took the image a man passing told me that the building site would be the new German Federal Intelligence service. Both of these sites of surveillance are in transition, the historical remnants breaking down and being overgrown and the contemporary being built. Sitting either side of the edges of the former death strip but this time framed by surveillance itself and in between, a wasteland. The new secret service building sits on the site of the former East German youth sports stadium named after Walter Ulbricht, the GDR politician responsible for building the Berlin Wall.
Liesenstrasse
This space is the former patrolled zone on one side of the Chausseestrasse / Liesenstrasse checkpoint between East and West Berlin.
