The American photographer presents at the Parisian fair and at the Mitte Museum in Berlin her series of images combining photography and cross-stitch, revealing in the photos the persistent memory of the separation wall.
Embroidery is the privileged art of memory. Since 2019, Diane Meyer has been embroidering the Berlin Wall. In his soberly titled series Berlin, the American photographer has sewn the image of the wall, its invisible persistence, onto the surface of photographs of the city methodically taken in places where the border once passed: emblematic places like the Reichstag or Checkpoint Charlie, but also forests, tourist areas outside the city center, such as the Glienicker bridge or Heilandskirche, a church located in Sacrow. In certain photos, half of the image is eaten by this ghost which still lurks in the collective psyche. On others, only a few points, three, four wires, passing around the corner of a street, indicate the missing person, like computer pixels disrupting the authenticity of the image, or like atoms undetectable to the eye. naked, still floating in the air of 2024, ready to solidify at the slightest signal into a new cold war.
Discovering this work this weekend thanks to the Sit Down gallery, in the Emergence section of the Paris Photo international fair, is also dreaming of the metaphorical charge of this gesture, which is both healing (we sew for mend) and falsification since it operates on the photo as memory operates in the cortex, by redrawing a frame, by connecting sometimes distant points, by filling in holes with another material and another color.
Initiated during a residency in 2019, the series is made up of 43 prints which follow the entire outline of the wall. In an interview given to the specialist magazine Fisheye, the American photographer, who also uses cross-stitch in a magnificent series of family photos, explains that she was particularly interested in the subtle clues of the wall's presence that remained in the Berlin landscape: “Patches of trees smaller than others, open lots, new construction, architectural differences in certain neighborhoods, street lights facing the wrong direction… I wanted to follow its entire circumference to see how it separated not only the center of the city, but also the surrounding suburbs and forests.” She also says she wanted to establish a link “between the idea of forgetting and the corruption of files, especially since much of what we remember comes from photographs.”
“Berlin” by Diane Meyer, until this Sunday, November 10 at Paris Photo-Grand Palais, with the Sit Down gallery and until February 23 at the Mitte Museum in Berlin.
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