EXHIBITION | Voices Seeking One Another

Voices Seeking One Another

At 3:32 a.m. on 6 April 2009, a powerful earthquake rocked the Italian town of L’Aquila and the surrounding area. Such were the geological conditions that its impact proved particularly tragic in the nearby village of Onna. Of its 300 inhabitants, 40 died that night. All that remained was devastation, and rubble.

The village had been struck by tragedy once before, during the Second World War. On 11 June 1944, soldiers of the retreating German Wehrmacht committed a massacre of the village population, blowing up almost a third of all the buildings in the process. Between 1943 and 1945 the Wehrmacht carried out atrocities throughout Italy, and the crime perpetrated in Onna is just one in a long series.

Ten years after the earthquake, Onna’s inhabitants were still living in temporary housing units next to the ruins that now constituted what had once been their village. It was around that time that I began my work in Onna on Voices Seeking One Another.

I took portraits of the residents, photographed landscapes, relics and views of the village, and immersed myself in the history of the place through historical footage and private photos. In addition, there are texts that form a separate level in the work. They are condensations of interviews, protocols and books.

‘Voices Seeking One Another´ is a work about memory, about the passing of time, about pain and loss, but also about the human ability to live one’s own life despite everything. There is only this one thing. Everything lives on, but the massacre and the earthquake show how quickly the present can disintegrate into a before and an after. I pick up the threads and try to bring them back together for the viewer.

On the occasion of the exhibition ‘Voices Seeking One Another’ at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, the book of the same name will be published by Fotohof edition, Salzburg. I am very pleased that büro uebele from Stuttgart is responsible for the design.

Programme

Artist talk and book launch: Göran Gnaudschun and Brigitte Werneburg
Wednesday, 2 July 2025, 7 pm

Curator tour in dialogue: Marc Wellmann in conversation with Barbara Esch-Marowski
Wednesday, 16 July 2025, 7 pm

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