“Spaces are always bound to the people who live in them ... These lives are strongly connected to the political situations in each country. So a personal history reflects the history of a country.” (Beatrice Minda)
Since 2003, Beatrice Minda (*1968 in Munich), formerly a pupil of Katharina Sieverding at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, has been working on a series of photographs that carefully explores questions regarding the relationship of homeland, exile, and (collective) identity, of the personal and political histories of a country. The first photographs of interiors were taken in Romania and reflect, as the artist says, the “atmospheres of the spaces in my childhood.” Other photographs were taken in Paris, Munich, and Berlin, which were the preferred destinations of twentieth-century Romanian migrants. In a third section, Minda photographed the shacks of Romanian migrant workers in the suburbs of Paris, where she also discovered a lovingly staged piece of her homeland.
This volume is the first to present this wonderful series, along with a text by Ulrich Pohlmann and a literary essay by German-Romanian author Richard Wagner.