NS ÖTZTAL
History is never far away. It lay in archives, cellars, stories, place names, family histories, museum storage rooms, and in the landscape through which I had walked myself.
This work was created as a commission for the Ötztaler Museen and deals with local traces of National Socialism in the Ötztal. I was interested in how such a past becomes visible in a specific valley. What remains? What is told? What is preserved? What disappears in the gaps between documents?
The work combines archival material, photographs, and reenactments. These reenactments are deliberately fragile. They mark gaps rather than closing them. Bodies appear in places where images are missing. The present overlays the past without replacing it. Reconstruction remains visible as an attempt.
I often thought of Walter Benjamin’s image of excavation. To remember means to remove layers, to hold fragments the wrong way round, to leave soil on them, to consider one’s own position in the terrain.
NS ÖTZTAL is therefore also a work about proximity. The past appears as something that continues to act within one’s place of origin, within one’s own gaze, and within the forms through which one tries to understand.
