2020/2021

During the course of the pandemic, spaces in close proximity to the terminus stations of the public transport lines in Bern stimulated my idea for a photographic work and made way for a new project involving my engagement with this city in which I live. Upon repeatedly visiting and photographing these spaces over the period of a year, it occurred to me that areas around these “last stops” often appeared as strikingly unfamiliar places in the city that I was born in and have known my whole life: The photographs attend to a view of close subjects that were simultaneously intimate and unfamiliar. Starting with thoughts of last stops and the themes of endings and starting points of a city in order to navigate this project, the focus shifted to my personal dealings with both the contradictions and restrictions imposed by the events we are currently experiencing. The sense of ambivalence arising while wandering through unfamiliar locations in a city so familiar, gathering traces and hints, and encompassing what is close but not apparently visible, led to a photographic trail of images that play out in the periphery of the “contemporary urban environment” of my city.