Drüben (2017-2022)

The 35mm series Drüben captures fragile moments of farewell to a place or a person, like static traces: familiar spaces and rituals are frozen as static snapshots that trigger personal memories. The resident, whose personality and presence echo in the arbour, flowerbeds and makeshift structures, whilst her loss renders her invisible. The allotment garden, as a conglomeration of space and time, bears traces of past improvisations, familiar hours, demographic change, leaving places empty or reoccupying them – a place that speaks of history without explicitly naming it, where neighbourliness must be redefined and renegotiated time and again. A place that can be so familiar and yet so alien. In the merging of inside and outside, between makeshift arrangements and empty chairs, a sense of longing resonates. The gaze is turned inwards, thus allowing no direct spatial or temporal localisation. The photographic precision suggests documentation, yet also opens up space for subjective projections. Melanie Schulz was interested in how intimate experiences – familial relationships, rituals, spaces – become sequences of images in which personal and collective memory overlap and can be translated into a poetic, quiet visual language.
Light, shadow, close-ups and sequences of images create an atmosphere that oscillates between intimacy and distance, between capturing and letting go. Familiar spaces appear fragmented and personal, as if one were being drawn into a private sphere, thus making tangible how places become vessels of memories, whilst at the same time narrating the moment of letting go. A place and a life that remain as a feeling.