ABOUT THE PROJECT:

Following his monograph „Foukauld - Disappearance“ (2012) Markus Oberndorfer’s book „Autrement on devient fou…..(OmdU) develops a complex reflexion on the possibilities of representation of history and its rememberance. The core of the book is an interview with Henri Lavrillat (1920-2014), a contemporary witness who was forcibly recruited as a „civilian worker“ to build the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall on Cap Ferret. The cinematically documented memory can be relocated as a trace in Oberndorfers (analog) photographic works and vice versa. The color photographs show the Cap today, a forest campsite with its seemingly provisional tourist-accommodation: A gap opens up, in which we are thrown back /reverberated on our own imagination. Lavrillats history presents itself as deeply personal, mediated narrative. Not by chance a portrait of him remembering is opposed to Jeff Walls „A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October 1947“. In the poster intervention „Se Souvenir“ that is also documented, the artist seeks to interact with the site and the passers-by. A book that sheds light on the diversity of voices of collective memory. (Katharina Manojlovic, for Eikon #87)