Deutsch
English
Background information
What in other families is the guest room, in Anne SCHÖNHARTING's family it was called the 'Africa Room'. Until recently it was located in a semi-detached house in Diera near Meissen. There it moved into the parents' house in the post-reunification period. For four generations the 'Afrikazimmer' was the place where great-grandfather Willy Klare's collection was kept. From 1907 to 1914, he worked as a cocoa plantation administrator in what is now Equatorial Guinea on behalf of a Liverpool trading company and collected numerous objects, including weapons, everyday objects, animal preparations and jewelry. In addition, hundreds of photographs as well as letters and postcards from this period are preserved. The family has held on to this collection for over four generations, arranging it again and again for themselves in their homes and adding their own travel souvenirs. In GDR times, the room was a symbol of identity, of distance and vastness, of the freedom to travel. Africa was considered a place of longing, the colonial background of the artifacts remained largely unreflected, the provenance unquestioned.
Content
After the death of her parents, the photographer was personally confronted with this heritage - and now places it in changed contexts in her work and this book. With her own pictures and reproductions of the inherited artifacts and photographs, Anne Schönharting embarks on an associative journey into a history unknown to her and consciously enters into a personal dialogue with her family's past, with German and European history, and with her own private and social colonial responsibility.
Exhibition
In the context of the Ostkreuz exhibition KONTINENT - In Search of Europe, Academy of Arts, Pariser Platz, Berlin, 2.10.2020 to 11.1.2021
About the photographer, Anne SCHÖNHARTING (b.1973)
Photo books by and with works on Anne SCHÖNHARTING
'Das Erbe' (2020); 'Kontinent' (Ostkreuz-Kompendium, 2020)