Postcards from Europe focuses not on the suffering of those involved, which has already been widely documented, but on the ways, the European Community relates to that suffering, administers undocumented migrants, and works to tighten control of its external borders. The text postcards that accompany each image draw on many different sources. Media reports, police files and press releases usually constitute the starting point for Eva Leitolf’s research and shape her fieldwork itineraries. While travelling she keeps a journal, and on-site she speaks with people connected to the events: migrants, refugees, seasonal workers, activists, trade unionists, local politicians, border guards. Later, these collected voices and sources come together to form the basis of the postcard texts.
For exhibition purposes, the archival pigment prints are mounted on boards and placed on a long shelving ledge. The texts are printed on postcards placed in stacks beside the images. Viewers are implicitly permitted to pick up the postcards. As well as addressing the phenomenon of migration, the interplay of image and text in Postcards from Europe explores aspects of perception, representation and of the processes of formation of meaning.
The project is conceived as an ongoing, open-ended archive. Postcards from Europe 03/13 published by Kehrer is the first of a planned series of publications from the artist’s continuously growing archive.
20 archive plates in a slipcase, 29,7 x 40 cm
English, German
ISBN 978-3-86828-398-3
Kehrer Verlag, 2013
A publication as an exhibition – as seen for instance during the exhibition “Whose land have I lit on now? Contemplations on the notion of hostipitality” 2018 at Savvy Contemporary in Berlin.
