Michel Kekulé - Mutterland

Mutterland

2019 - 2025

Mutterland is a fragmentary documentary photo series by Michel Kekulé that explores the societal and personal fault lines left behind by German reunification (Wiedervereinigung) in the provinces of the former GDR. More than 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the consequences of this profound transformation remain palpable. The work traces a landscape marked by change, while also searching the past for answers. It moves between collective reckoning and an intimate examination of the photographer’s own family history.

Mutterland does not glorify the past nor romanticize a vanished state. It is an attempt to grasp what does not disappear in times of transition, but rather shifts into new forms. A visual search for the fractures in the East whose echoes are only now becoming audible. What remains is the photograph: as evidence, as a quiet claim to presence.

Mutterland
Artist book, edition of 50
Hardcover, linen-bound
248 × 300 mm, 88 pages

2025, Mutterland - Jahrgang Neunzehn, Gute Gesellschaft - Wilhelm Studios Berlin, GER | © Thomas Meyer/OSTKREUZ

2025, Mutterland - Installation, two monitors, DDR precast concrete slabs, Atelier für Fotografie Berlin, GER

Exhibition view: 2023, Mutterland, „East from where“, Studio Hanniball, Berlin | © Xiaofu Wang

Artist Statement (2025)

With Mutterland, I return to the region of my family’s origins – a rural area in the Thuringian Forest that stands as a representative for many peripheral spaces in East Germany. My family comes from Schweina; the neighboring village, Steinbach, was one of those places where publicly owned enterprises once formed the economic backbone. There, my grandfather worked as a knifemaker – part of a state-organized production system that collapsed within a short time after reunification. My mother, barely an adult, left the region in the year of upheaval, as the GDR was taking its final breaths. Two decades later, she returned – to a housing estate that now acts like a magnifying glass for the region’s structural ruptures. Planned as the 101st residential complex of the GDR, the estate today stands as a symptom of abandonment, demolition, and socio-spatial disconnection. Despite isolated efforts at urban renewal, the 101st remained marked by emigration, economic weakness, and a struggle for new perspectives.

The changes that came after 1990 reached deep into people’s lives, shook social structures, and left a society in which much did not begin anew, but remained fractured. In my work, I encounter people whose biographies bear the marks of this history – and others born later. The images do not offer certainty; they raise questions. My own family history is woven into this fabric – not as a private trace, but as part of a collective experience that remains deeply individual.

My childhood unfolded between two villages – one in the East, one in the West. Ninety kilometers apart – yet the lives in between were worlds away: unequal chances, different languages, different systems. During the week I stood on a schoolyard in West Germany; on weekends I returned to a place where togetherness had a different sound. I was a foreign body – on both sides. I experienced devaluation as “the one from the Zone” or “the one from the West,” depending on where I happened to be – with an East German mother and a West German father.

I felt the rupture between identities and worlds long before I had words for it. The silence ran deep – no one in my family had the language for what had happened. I found those words much later – and am only now beginning to grasp their weight.

The visual language of Mutterland is rendered in black and white. The choice of monochrome is not only a stylistic reduction, but a gesture toward the tradition of social documentary photography. At the same time, the images resist being pinned to the present; they point toward a space in which time does not unfold linearly but in layers.

Mutterland is not a glorification of the past, nor a romanticization of a vanished state. It is an attempt to grasp what does not disappear in transition but shifts elsewhere. A search for the fractures in the East whose reverberations are only now becoming audible. What remains is the image: as evidence, as a claim to the present.

Björn Kuhligk
Excerpt from an exhibition speech on Mutterland (2025)

“Cold, grinding transformation processes, vacuum, anomic conditions, right-wing violence, deindustrialization, empty factory halls, grass growing over rusty rails, sharpened elbows, atomization, social segregation, drug floods, imprints of dictatorship, political disillusionment, resignation, birth slump, gangsta rap, bleeding-out regions, mass unemployment, devaluation, decline, shame, guilt, silence, silence, silence.” Hendrik Bolz

There we are. We have arrived. In Thuringia.

But back to the first two biographical details. Born in 1991, a so-called post-reunification child, commuting between East and West. Michel Kekulé thus grew up in Thuringia at a time when the so-called adults were occupied with themselves and a constantly changing present. Raised by those who were supposed to provide stability and were themselves without stability. In a time full of fears: fear of the future, of unemployment, of insufficient money, of what might yet come, of the sell-off, of the next intervention by the Treuhand agency, of the buildings where one once worked, where children once went to kindergarten or school and which now stood as ruins in the so-called blooming landscapes, about which the national anthem of the GDR sang—though other German ruins were meant—that one had risen from them and turned toward the future. All promises. All hopes. All cold coffee.

From Stuttgart, the Thuringian town of Schweina is as far by car as the French city of Nancy. And perhaps there is as much space and foreignness between Stuttgart and Schweina as between Stuttgart and Nancy. Schweina is where the photographer’s family comes from. The 101st housing estate of the GDR, consisting of prefabricated apartment blocks originally built for 5,000 people, forms the backdrop of his work, as do the Thuringian Forest, Schweina, and Steinbach, the town where the photographer’s grandfather worked as a knife maker.

How, then, can origin, how can a motherland be photographed? It can—if we address the most obvious aspect of these images—only be photographed with such force and foresight in black and white. Black and white relinquishes the ballast of color, the omnipresence of the present. For this work tells far more than what appears visibly before us. It shows us the present, the claimed present, but it also directs the gaze backward, toward the beginning of this story, and it does so with the help of the monochrome.

Some of the photographs are coarse-grained, their hardness reminiscent of the works of Michael Schmidt. If one insists on categorization, the entire body of work could be placed within artistic documentary photography. At the same time, it is of course an autobiographical work, which in its execution transcends the autobiographical and achieves a universality.

And yet the images are locatable. They could not have been made in the Swabian Alb, the Black Forest, or the Lüneburg Heath. They are situated where the loss of origin—or its massive transformation—has altered the ground so profoundly that the memory of what existed only a few decades ago fills entire spaces of remembrance.

The images dig. They question. They provide no answers—why should they? They begin where silence begins and speak, if images can speak, the unsayable.

Mutterland is a dissecting work, one shaped by humanism, a work that portrays, piece by piece, the pain of loss.

The images do not tell a finished story. They leave gaps into which we, as viewers, may step; they invite us to do so. Animals and people and buildings—almost everything appears as fragments. The larger whole is withheld, as if everything were already said, everything shown, everything made clear by these fragments, as if there were no whole, no completeness.

Each photograph shows a fragment of the whole, yet claims to show the whole—the entire present, broken situation. Even the steel beams protruding from a concrete block, as if the inside had turned outward, have lost their function; they no longer hold what they were meant to hold. They, too, have lost their task.

We see no wide panoramas. And when the gaze does reach into the distance, it is limited by fog or darkness. And when the sun shines, it appears veiled. The sky seems nailed shut with a dirty plate, and what we see lies beneath it: enclosed, confined.

Then again, the sky during a thunderstorm with wide-spanning, branching lightning that looks as if the sky itself had torn—torn like the windshield of a vehicle. The portrayed people move between hopelessness and confidence. Faces are covered; some gazes look toward the light.

There are no adolescents depicted in Mutterland. The only minors are two children behind masks. Sociologists commissioned to conduct a youth study might return home empty-handed. The motherland appears to have no offspring. Whether this is actually true is beside the point. The claim that it could be so is decisive.

Even nature seems no longer intact. It appears fragile, damaged, filled with gaps and disturbances. Even the landscape, in Michel Kekulé’s images, seems afraid, uncertain, not knowing what to do. The animals recurring throughout the work—for example, the horse standing with its front legs on a car tire—also appear displaced, lost.

When I first saw that image years ago, it burned itself into memory. Everyone here knows such images: ones seen once and never forgotten. I work as a poet, and there, too, I deal with images—linguistic images. I wrote a poem responding to the photograph “Horse on Car Tire.” It was my attempt to close the gaps open to me, to grasp what seemed ungraspable in this image. I will read it to you.

(The poem follows in the original German.)

Das Pferd in der Dunkelheit

Was ging uns das helle Sirren

der Leuchtstoffröhren an und was der Schlaf

das Schlafen und der Dämmerzustand

was ging uns der lange Regen an

und nach dem Regen das Rufen des Kuckucks

aus dem Trichter des Waldes

und was die Bäume und was das Holz

was gingen uns die heruntergeregneten Blüten an

und was das vom Aussterben bedrohte Silbergras

das Herz am Grunde, das Herz war müde

was ging uns das Herz an und das langsam

sehr langsam auf den Abend gedrehte Licht

was ging uns das Pferd an hinter dem Neubaugebiet

mit den Vorderbeinen auf einem Autoreifen

eine Zirkusnummer, abgebrochen schon im Versuch

als wolle es das, was ist, verneinen, als wolle es

das große Schweigen, das aufsteigt aus der dunklen Wiese

auf Abstand halten, was ging uns das Pferd an

für Michel Kekulé

The hand that writes is always too slow. The present exists only in the present and cannot be transferred into any art form, not even photography, because the finger that presses the shutter is also always too slow. The perception of the present occurs through all the senses, and these—apart from sight—cannot be transferred to a photograph. Moreover, it is not our present, but the present of the photograph, taken by another person. If we wish to look at the images, we are compelled to adopt the gaze of another.

Michel Kekulé’s images claim the present. It is the photographer’s present and thus at the same time ours. We are allowed to see and observe it, and because these images touch us, we become part of them.

And what seems preserved in Mutterland, pointing far beyond the visible, is nothing less than the core of humanity: affection, empathy, and respect. Affection for the region, for the landscape, for one’s own origin. Empathy for the people and respect for them.

Nina Maier

A short essay by curator and art historian Nina Maier (Kunstmuseum Thurgau)

The ongoing series Mutterland, which began in 2019, is Michel Kekulé's thesis project.

Set in the eastern German province, in a town in Thuringia, to which Michel Kekulé, as a "post-reunification child," has a personal connection, the black-and-white photographs exude a quiet, slightly melancholic atmosphere.

They depict portraits of places, spaces, and people from the former GDR and draw attention to the impact of history on the present. The 1990s and 2000s were characterized by promises of 'blooming landscapes' and hopes that were not fulfilled after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many regions were or are in decline.

In the media, as a result of unemployment and missed opportunities for reunification, there was talk of the so-called 'baseball bat years'. This hashtag was established in 2019 by journalist Christian Bangel, under which a collection of memories quickly emerged on Twitter. Reports accumulated of right-wing violence in the post-reunification years. These retrospective accounts made it clear that these were not isolated experiences, but rather a generational experience.

Mutterland is a kind of socio-documentary portrait of a society that hovers somewhere between past and future. Michel Kekulé captures the current state of this place in Thuringia, reflecting on the influence of reunification to this day. Although German reunification was over 30 years ago, there is still often a distinction made between West and East Germany in public discourse. There are still economic, social, and structural differences between the old and new federal states. The term "Wendeverlierer" (losers of reunification) is used.

Against this background, Mutterland functions like a visual inventory, reflecting the status quo but at the same time making visible something that has long since passed.

In the images of Mutterland, a sense of loss and the search for identity is palpable. It echoes the memory of a country that no longer exists but has certainly left its mark and shaped its people. The work deals with the inheritance of losses and traumas across generations and raises the question of how history is processed and passed on.

In this respect, the theme of the work also corresponds to photography, the medium in which it is negotiated: It has, like photography itself, a presence in the present, but at the same time, what it makes visible belongs to the past. In the case of Mutterland, the relationship between the layers of time is even more acute because the series shows something that was no longer there at the time of capture but is still visible and tangible.

Mutterland is, so to speak, an echo of the past in the present.