Session 9 – Spectral Presence 2

Susanne Junker
The Necropolis Project – The Sand From the Urns

The study of death, time and transitoriness are among the oldest and most essential themes in philosophy, religion and art. The »Necropolis Project« focuses on visual forms of memory of war, death, destruction, loss, time and decay. Symbols, ciphers, allegories and the human face are examined in terms of architectural history, cultural science and art theory with photographs and visual-media experiments – a phenomenological invitation to look, to read and understand pictures, to reflect and to contemplate.

The »pictures« are on the streets, squares and bridges of Berlin, at memorial sites, in cemeteries, in parks. They are part of our everyday lives, yet they have to be discovered and translated as cultural historical narratives. Symbols and allegories, however, do not necessarily depict reality but also representations from a spatiotemporal world of ideas. When we look for these images and assemble them as a visual collection, we find ourselves in a field of tension between seeing and perceiving, impression, experience and memory, sense and meaning. Further parameters are the questions to the degree of reality, of authenticity, of perspective, of pathos and aesthetics.

In order to discover the identity and the context of the respective images, their motif history, we have developed an iconographic description as a cultural-scientific analysis. This also includes aspects such as changing an image e.g. through details, adjustments or relocation to other settings, as well as iconological decryption and interpretation.

But like Renaissance and Baroque artists, we play with these – in part ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian – narratives and retell them by experimenting with photography, digital graphics and video techniques in artistic-architectural terms – with contemporary virtual media. Creative thinking and imagination open the eyes, resurrect scenes and shift or expand reality.