Beyond the Border

Video / 2019
Bachelor’s thesis at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
supervised by Emanuala De Cecco and Thomas Mayfried

EN

Being a child of a German and a Czech parent, I have crossed the border between Germany and the Czech Republic hundreds of times in my life. In an effort to understand my own cultural heritage I was drawn to travel around the regions attached to that border. I was hoping to find a place where the two cultures became one. Where 1+1=3.

But I did not find a place with a ‘perfect amalgamation’ of the two.

There was no place that had answers to questions of my own belonging. What I found was a place, that was much more complex – historically, socially, economically. What I found were the present traces of the past. And it is those traces I was looking to capture.

The something that unites both Czechia and Germany to make it a third new entity is me. My work connects photography with stories of my family and the land. It examines how I view both cultural spaces and how through them I perceive myself.

Instalation view / 2019
at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
projection on wall

Daniel Adlmüller

Beyond the Border