SUDETEN IMPOTENCE
Photographing Sudetenland is to face our helplessness in the face of time, in the face of history.
Photographing Sudetenland is to face our helplessness in the face of time, in the face of history.
"There is nothing to do, it’s obsessive and it obsesses me" Chantal Akerman
To try to explore Sudetenland, one must be patient. These regions do not indulge in the passing intruder.
Just like these villages destroyed in the 50s, the last traces of the Sudeten are no more than ruins or already completely erased.
How to photograph the memory of a place striped from the map? How to grasp an absent referent? The tragic fate of these once prosperous lands sounds like a warning to our contemporary Europe that believes being safe from horror.
- 1900: The German minority living mainly in the Sudeten Mountains represents 30% of the Bohemian population
- 1938: Munich Agreements. Hitler annexes the Sudetenland. Expulsions and persecutions of "enemies of the Reich" - 1945: Benes Decrees. Expulsion of 2.6 million Germans. Around 30,000 dead. - 1948: Installation of the "Iron Curtain" in the Sudetenland. 3,000 villages striped from the map. - 1989: Opening of borders.