The series of photographs is work in progress since 1998. I have taken the photographs in over 20 countries, i.a. in Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Mali, Senegal, Mozambique, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Ukraine, Poland - and Austria.

The initial idea behind this series of photographs was to forge a connection with the place I was travelling around and to document it. Another type of tourist photo if you will: not me in front of a monument, but me at ground level. Devoting many years of my time to this has opened my eyes to the differences in the condition of the soil, the things found, the signs recorded in the earth, the specific change of perspective, the silhouettes and reflections. Images that we usually look for at eye level and cannot therefore find. I don’t arrange anything, I merely select the detail and time of the photo.

The longer I practise this as a means of expressing my bearings and inclination for places, the more an interest in the particular composition of a place at a certain moment shifts towards an interest in the importance of soil as a coordinate in one’s own feeling of space for instance, as an metaphor, as a surprise place, as a point that includes or excludes feeling at home, as a mark of one who’s remote and yet still on this earth.

See publication in Wiener Zeitung, 6. 6. 2009, p. 12