MIT KOHLE NACH DÜBENDORF: Kunstwerke über die Macht des Zeigens und die Rolle von Kohle in der Prägung von Kultur in Dübendorf¹(2009)

Perhaps it is driven by a fear of irrelevance - an anxiety that your own thoughts and memories might bear no real meaning - that so many makers of visual art today are making raids on official records of the past. And for better or for worse this is where this project began - with a series of old postcards from a bent-eared blue folder on the back shelf of a town´s small and dusty archive. The postcards had been made to commemorate a visit by the LZ127 Zeppelin, and the appearance of this strange airship in its small postcard form had an immediate, almost hypnotic effect on me. When staring at the pictures I felt certain I could understand why this enormous, incongruous, 250 metre long flying machine had drawn a crowd of more than 42 000 onlookers. Some drawings began, and in the days and weeks that followed I kept digging into the town's local records – all in the hope that I might deepen my engagement with this event once held in 1929.