Andrea Grützner:Erbgericht

For over a century, a traditional guesthouse and tavern known as the Erbgericht has operated as a local meeting place in the eastern part of Germany close to Dresden, in the village of my grandparents called Polenz. Run by one family since 1898, this particular establishment has witnessed five different political eras – the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, the German Democratic Republic, and today’s Federal Republic. I feel simultaneously at home and alienated in this space, which has fascinated me since my early childhood and shows all different layers of its history. Its labyrinth of rooms, nooks, corners, and objects contains generations of memories. These are, however, not divulged by the space itself, but instead shaped through one’s own projections. Using colored flash gels, I methodically scanned its interior, allowing the shadows to dictate the structure of each image. Shadows duplicate, obfuscate, and deconstruct the source that they reference. Like photographs, they are a metaphor for memory itself. New spaces are born in the split second of each flash, dismantling and distorting the functional reality as it is captured. I’m interested in the dissolution of space, and the tension between the real place and its projected image. Through this transfiguration of familiar structures, any sense of time and space disappears. After a longer look, one notices small cracks in the plaster. Unfolding beyond its pictorial construction, the space is sensed with a mixture of fascination and estrangement.
Today, the Erbgericht hovers in a delicate limbo, a place suspended between past and present. It quietly bears the traces of generations while witnessing the ongoing transformation and upheaval since reunification, where layers of memory, history, and imagined futures mingle. In this space, identities feel uncertain, shifting with the shadows and echoes of the past, as the familiar and the unfamiliar coalesce in fragile balance.

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