A banner image from the project Levelled Landscapes with a long bubble level in the forground, and out-of-focus lake in sunset in the background

Leveled Landscapes

The project Leveled Landscapes explores Austrian sites whose difficult histories remain unsettled, contested, neglected or buried. A series of photographs, usually exhibited alongside an open archive, reveal burdened landscapes in which history, memory and commemoration are an ongoing political process. A spirit level (bubble level, Wasserwaage) placed in the foreground of the image renders the landscapes as blurry backgrounds.

The spirit level is a measurement tool – it is the precondition for leveling grounds and the construction of new realities. Embedded in the photographic apparatus itself, the level provides visual assurance and a sense of reliability, granting a ‘natural’ perception of the scenery. Landscape, one of the first and most captured subjects of photography, is neither neutral nor natural or innocent.

Leveled Landscapes investigates how politics of memory and commemoration shape landscapes. It portrays the way national processes of narration and myth construct our perception of landscapes, the way we capture them, render them, and live in them.

Among other extreme right-wingers of the Pan-German student fraternity (Burschenschaft) Suevia, the monument for their dead honors SS member Gerhard Lausegger, who murdered the head of the Jewish community in Innsbruck, Richard Berger, during the November pogrom of 1938, and fled to Argentina after the end of the war.
Perhaps the most famous Viennese landmark, it was actually the Nazis who gave it its status after robbing it from its Jewish owner, Eduard Steiner, and murdering him in Auschwitz concentration camp, around 1944. This history is still absent from the Riesenrad’s official presentations.
With 5.2 million visitors per year, the Stephansdom is Vienna’s most recognized symbol. It is also a symbol for the creation of the victim myths after WWII by disseminating a false narrative regarding its destruction during the last days of WWII.
The story of Seibane Wague, Mauritanian physicist living in Austria since 1996, killed by the police and medical team on the night of July 15, 2003, during an African cultural event, is still missed at the park after his memorial was maliciously set on fire a week after his killing.
The forced labor camp for Hungarian Jews during WWII, flooded under water of a quarry in the 1960s, and converted to a recreational area by St. Pölten, 2005. Its story surfaced partially the same year, thanks to writer Manfred Wieninger, followed by an art project by Catrin Bolt and Tatiana lecomte, 2010.
Initiated and designed by high-school students, the seven-meter Menorah, built 1997, commemorates the 1938 November Pogrom. Located in a square named after Tyrol’s governor, who was Nazi party member, Tyrol’s first public Holocaust commemoration simplifies the events by ignoring local academic research and using the stereotypical religious symbol.
Here during the last days of WWII, in one of the Death Marches, around 1,700 Jewish prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp were brought by train, marched, starved, frozen, many murdered. Nowadays, many tourists arrive here especially for the well-organized hiking paths in the area.
A scene from the making-of the series Levelled Landscapes depicting the large format camera, the sipirt level plate, both set up infront of a pictoresque landscape in Carinthia, Austria

Leveled Landscapes is part of a project trilogy about the politics of memory in Austria, produced in collaboration with Karin Schneider as part of the research projects MemScreen (2011-2013) and Conserved Memories (2013-2016) based at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. These projects were funded by the Austrian Science Fund under their Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK: AR 96, AR 212-G21).