TXL.
Last Call Berlin

Summer 2018 in the flight entry lane of Tegel Airport. Children play on a bouncy castle, elderly ladies sit chatting outside a café, an angler sits quietly on the banks of the Havel River.

At five-minute intervals, airplanes roar close over the idle hustle and bustle on the ground. Two years later, the sky is empty. Tegel Airport has closed its tarmac for good, and some Berliners are already thinking nostalgically back to their many holiday trips that started here. So close. So easy. For residents, on the other hand, peace is finally returning to their neighborhoods after many years of constant noise pollution.

The eponymous publication brings together observations of a now distant memory. The omnipresence of airplanes in the sky over north-west Berlin. (Limited Edition of 100 copies., 2021, self-published)

On November 8, 2020, the last plane took off from TXL, in the first year of the Corona pandemic which had already brought air traffic to a temporary standstill before the airports closure. So the final months of Tegel Airport turned into a bumpy landing after unprecedented years of mishaps and delays during the construction of BER airport which now replaces TXL.

It took 14 years to complete BER, which was supposed to replace TXL as the capital's airport much earlier. By contrast, Tegel, then a military airport, had been built in just 90 days. Originally built for 2.5 million passengers per year, TXL most recently carried up to 20 million passengers.

While working on the photo series TXL, Last Call Berlin, I was not interested in the airport itself, but in its immediate surroundings. I repeatedly roamed through the neighborhoods on foot in the summer of 2018. In the process, I first focussed on the question of what relationship people and the city have to the omnipresent air traffic. The photographs show seemingly fleeting encounters between the people in the urban spaces on the ground and the machines hanging heavy in the sky.

Ausstellung im Kunstmuseum Bochum, 2021.
Vonovia Award für Fotografie “Zuhause”.

“Was bedeuten Wohnen und Leben heute – im urbanen Umfeld, auf dem Land, im sozialen Kontext und in der Community? Wie leben wir jetzt und wie werden wir in Zukunft leben? Was in unserem Leben ist öffentlich, was privat und intim? Das sind nur einige der Fragen, die sich beim Thema ZUHAUSE stellen. Natürlich liegt der Fokus auch auf der Suche nach unserem´"neuen Leben" in und mit einer Pandemie, die die Welt in Atem hält.”