We are the narrative of our own memory and the memory of others about us. Perhaps this is why I loved listening to my father (1932 – 2020) tell me about his childhood – a childhood that, despite hunger and war, he always described in wonderful images. The temporal context is the Second World War, culturally we are in the midst of the community of the Banater Swabians, a German minority in Romania.
In 2014, I decided to record his stories – on the one hand, because I wanted to capture this shared moment; and on the other hand, because his stories are not only documents of time, but also tell something about myself. The interviews are accompanied by my own photographs and video clips from contemporary Romania (2015).
The work “Garden of Eden” is about home as utopia, about childhood as a lost paradise, and about identity fed by narratives.
