The photo series KEINE PLAKATE documented the change in the billposting of cultural events in public spaces in Berlin from March 2020. The change to the billboards that is part of Berlin’s cityscape, whether commercially organised or wild postering, no longer took place.
Over time, the pasting over of billboards ended as a new signature for disappearance, displacement, as a caesura of a time of standstill. Posters, with their outdated announcements in an otherwise fast-moving and competitive sector, left traces of a weather related aesthetic takeover; rain and wind unfolded the layers of paper and left behind poster motifs torn into strips for what no longer took place. From the formerly large, smooth surfaces, new arrangements were formed from the remaining scraps of paper. The ripped, often overlapping paper surfaces of the older and more recent posters combined to create a new look: motifs without a clear intention complemented each other with semantics taken out of context – word fragments, single letters, dates and times intermingled and marked a time-specific in-between.
What at first seemed to be a disorder reassembled itself – began to take on a life of its own as traces left behind. Outdated things joined together, remained visible, told something new. Images visualised what was absent. Photographs of past poster series were created that show their own beauty of overwriting and only become visible in the unfolding of the paper layers as cracks that recombine the overlays.
From this observation, a series of photographs was created that shows this time-changing moment of a global pandemic and a standstill in culture by means of perception in public space and documents its transience. A selection of photographs, from which a poster motif was also chosen, is now being published.
