#eva leitolf

photo eva leitolf/gemälde vergessen

eva leitolf/ double exposure

Ich beteilige mich an einer neuen Studiengruppe “Studiengalerie”. Die zugrundeliegende Idee der Studiengruppe ist die Frage, wie Erinnerungspolitik und Bildgebrauch miteinander verknüpft sind. Dabei werden vor allem Künstler*innen vorgestellt, die mit ihren Werken am kollektiven Gedächtnis wirken.

Postcards from Europe - Eva Leitolf

Dargestellt sind Unorte und Nebenschauplätze, die nicht einer typischen Postkarte entsprechen. Auch das Format entspricht nicht dem einer Postkarte. Das Material ist eine auf einfacher Pappe aufgezogene Fotografie. Die Motivwahl entspricht dem Ungoing Arthype. Neben der Postkarte wird ein Text gereicht, die den Ort genauer spezifiziert und einen gesellschaftskritischen Hintergrund aufzeigt. Der Ort erhält seine Zuschreibung durch den Text.

Orange Grove, Rosarno, Italy 2010

In January 2010 the price obtained by Calabrian citrus growers for their Moro and Navel oranges was five euro cents per kilogram. They paid their mostly illegally employed and undocumented African and Eastern European seasonal workers between €20 and €25 for a day’s work. Depending on the variety and the state of the trees a worker can pick between four and seven hundred kilograms of oranges in a day. The business was no longer profitable and many farmers left the fruit to rot.

During the 2009–2010 harvest there were between four and five thousand migrants living in and around Rosarno, most of them in abandoned buildings or plastic shelters, without running water or toilets.

On 7 January 2010 local youths fired an air-gun at African orange-pickers returning from work and injured two of them. The ensuing demonstration by migrant workers ended in severe clashes with parts of the local population, during which cars were set on fire and shop windows broken. Accommodation used by seasonal workers was burned and hundreds fled, fearing the local citizens or deportation by the authorities.

On 9 January, under police protection from jeering onlookers, about eight hundred Africans were bussed out to emergency accommodation in Crotone and Bari.

Eva Leitolf

One day after the arson attack of 20 April 1994, Bielefeld-Senne 1994 MUNICH.- In her complex work created between 1992 and 2008 - »Deutsche Bilder - eine Spurensuche« (»German Images - Looking for Evidence«) - the photographer Eva Leitolf engages in a discourse concerning xenophobically motivated acts of violence and the social debate surrounding them. The pictures, which she took in the early to mid-1990s, reflect the scenes of the attacks, the sympathisers and innocent bystanders. When Eva Leitolf returned to this assignment in 2006, she reduced the content of the images to what took place and how this was treated in legal, media and political circles. Her work, conceived from the outset as an ongoing study, questions the way society deals with xenophobically motivated violence and tests the possibilities and limitations of what can be caught on camera.

Eva Leitolf