digital photographs
2018 - 2021
In 2018 I moved to Berlin. This was a time of noticeable gentrification in the city, particularly in the former east where many places had remained untouched since reunification in the 1980s. Consequences of this ever-present construction work were walls of scaffolding, closed sections of pavement, kilometers of overground pipework suspended along seemingly every street in Pankow and Prenzlauer Berg, and many skips. The skips became a symbol of the struggle between people and architecture. They blocked traffic, they crashed with hollow noise as things were thrown into them, opening like flowers during the day and concealing their contents at night. They even moved around, somehow crossing streets or disappearing without warning. They hid the local residents who searched for their bikes and doorways between them. Some of the skips became prostrate figures whose portraits I took and before long I realised I had an album of different characters whose presence signified both stability and transformation, small versions of the city itself wrapped up in blue, red, yellow and purple.
