Louisa Boeszoermeny: The State I Am In
There is a slightly uncomfortable feeling that does not let you go whilst looking through the series “The State I Am In”, as if there is a danger, a potential threat or an invisible enemy hiding around the corner. The images are sequences in a way that escalates the feeling and still, in the end, leaves you with a question if it was a real threat of just a sensation, somebody’s manipulation, imposed and staged in the interests of state security?
Louisa Boeszoermeny: In "THE STATE I AM IN" I approach the complex topic 'inner security‘ both on a personal and on a sociopolitical level. It is a conceptual body of work that encompasses elements of documentary, portrait and still photography. I aim to illuminate aspects of the field, such as surveillance, fear of ‚the other/ed‘, aspiration, an inner shelter, state authority, isolation, containment, demarcation and the diametrically opposed relationship between freedom and security. My motivation during the process of working on the series has been to discover how a society behaves and changes in face of an asserted, diffuse threat. I‘m contrasting these visual examinations with abstractions that adumbrate the feeling of inner security. I have visited places which are connected to the subject matter, such as the Security Academy Berlin, the former Stasi Prison where I portrayed former inmates and fragmentarily photographed the surface of the rubber cell and the law enforcement fair Enforce Tac. It was my intention to actively participate in the events with my camera and to some extend interfere, rather than to document as an observer. By leaving out visual information I underline the arbitrariness with which the concept of an enemy is being designed.
Topics that I tend to gravitate towards are questions of control, aesthetics of inner worlds, loneliness, identity, mental health. I like combining extracted documentary images that raise questions rather that informing about a process, with staged scenes that rather work on emotional levels and which I hope resonate within the viewers.
www.louisaboeszoermeny.com
