Michel Kekulé - Mutterland

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.

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

Exhibition view: 2024, Mutterland, "Signals" Kunsthalle Konstanz | © Torben Nüdling

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

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

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.