Elsa & Johanna
The Timeless Story of Moormerland

The series will be installed in a specially conceived installation, both as a projection of 160 analogue slides, and as traditional photographic prints. Over a period of four weeks in May 2021, Elsa and Johanna were based temporarily in Northern Germany in several villages in and around Moormerland in Lower Saxony. The artists chose with care houses with a kind of “outmoded charm” in which they stayed long enough to imagine and bring to life various characters; including sad young adolescents, fathers and housewives… The resulting photographs suggest the imaginary lives of the neighbourhood inhabitants through the strange, almost cinematic aesthetic that characterises the work of the duo.

The recourse to auto- fiction, at the heart Elsa & Johanna’s practice permits them to stage scenarios with characters freed from their own identities, and thereby to interrogate contemporary questions of individuality, as well as notions of self-representation and anonymity. These images, organised as though taken from family albums, mix posed portraits, spontaneous and accidental photographs, and fragments of interiors, proposing multiple and interrelated narratives of imaginary daily lives.

____________________

The exhibition is organized with the support of