Edition 2021

ANTON KUSTERS

BLUE SKIES

Blue Skies sets out to explore the visualisation of trauma and how its fading memory can be recorded. Kusters travelled 177,828 km to every corner of the former Third Reich over a period of six years to capture the blue sky above every known location of the 1,078 official Nazi Germany SS Concentration camps. Most of these sites remain unmarked to this day. To locate every site and make sure that the sky above would be blue, he relied on a combination of GPS and live satellite infrared cloud cover footage, manually blind-stamping the coordinates and estimated number of victims into every image made. The images gathered by the artist will eventually fade into emptiness. Their numbers will always remain. Attempting to exhaustively witness often fails to lead to understanding. In dialogue with the audio and visual piece by Ruben Samama, the work opens up a space for reflection between the fractures of evidential specificity and the abstracted trace of the blue skies above.

Exhibition curator: Monica Allende.
Publication: 1078 Blue Skies/4432 Days, Kehrer, 2021.
Sound artist: Ruben Samama.
Prints by Imprenta, Antwerp.
Framing by Wood4Art, Mechelen.

  • Institutional partners

    • République Française
    • Région Provence Alpes Côté d'Azur
    • Département des Bouches du Rhône
    • Arles
    • Le Centre des monuments nationaux est heureux de soutenir les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles en accueillant des expositions dans l’abbaye de Montmajour
  • Main partners

    • Fondation LUMA
    • BMW
    • SNCF
    • Kering
  • Media partners

    • Arte
    • Lci
    • Konbini
    • Le Point
    • Madame Figaro
    • France Culture