Andrea Grützner

ERBGERICHT

ERBGERICHT (2013-2023)

The Erbgericht in eastern Germany has been a guesthouse for more than a hundred years. The house is a projection screen for generations of memories and emotions. I use photography to create a tension between abstraction and the actual existence of place. The installed filtered flashlights produce a moment of de-familiarization in the house itself, not clearly visible to the eye. In the fragmented photographic spaces the viewer cannot be sure whether she or he perceives objects or glowing shadows. As an imperfect representation on trace of a real object, shadows are closely related to photography: both show things which are or have been there as a distorted version of reality. Based on the photographs, the viewer reconstructs the place in a different manner; a process similar to the way we recall spaces in our memory. The real house echoes in the pictures, in which any sense of time and space becomes lost.