To Remember Is to Forget. To Forget Is to Remember.

In 2010, Judith Siegmund was an artist-in-residence fellow of the Hanseatic city of Rostock, where she lived in an artist’s studio apartment in the eastern section of the old city. She spent her childhood from 1972 to 1979 at almost exactly the same location in which the studio apartment is located. In 1983, she moved into one of the many “squats” (occupied apartments) there at age seventeen. Thus, within the framework of her grant, the artist returned to one of the primary places in which she grew up. During her fellowship, Siegmund photographed thirty locations with which she connects memories and wrote a reminiscence to every photograph. However, the relationship between text and image is not a textual explanation of what one sees in the picture. Instead, the texts tell something else than what one can discover in these photos made in 2010. The photographic viewpoint is directed towards specifically chosen geographic sections of the city, which, on the one hand, are photographed without people, but, on the other hand, show traces of actual life (cars, trash cans, scaffolding) and as a result try to escape such a historicization of what is photographed.