Falling Action

 55 postcards, found photographs + urban development

About 

For four years, I held on to a photo album that I found in the halls of an abandoned theater in Leipzig. Theatre-Fabrik-Sachsen. The photo album was an archive of rehearsals, which took place inside of the building. Purple and silky, draped in pearls and feathered headbands, in these pictures everyone is costumed in the style of the roaring 20’s. 

Once it was abandoned by the company, this building, several floors of treasures and trash, became a place known to locals as a marvelous scavenging pit - the stuff of lore. And it was not going to last forever. Such ephemeral digs are bound to transience. In recent years, the building, among many others in this working-class part of Leipzig, was renovated and converted into upscale living units. Condominiums. Loft lands. 

The photographs fermented on my shelf. I decided to return them to the new inhabitants. This project takes the form of 55 postcards, but it is also a happening between myself, 74 people, and the internet. It became a project about making public a locally embedded memory, urban development and gentrification, in which DHL post becomes an involuntary collaborator, facilitating some kind of intervention/haunting/friendly reminder of a not-so-distant past.

Postcard Text

Dear neighbor,

This is a piece of forgotten history from 2018.

The abandoned theater building was being looted by locals of Leutzsch. Curious residents roamed the halls, through the endless rooms of props. We chose tokens, we took costumes and lamps, fabrics and dolls. Before security was hired and kept us out, people drove into the wreckage with vans, to adopt larger furniture. Towards the end of this chapter, some people evidently squatted the premises.

As I dug through piles of scattered documents to find clues, I found a photo album. An archive of rehearsals.I now return this abandoned memory back to the building, and to you.

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