josef chladek

on photobooks and books

Stuke Katja & Oliver Sieber - Peripheren, Kettler, 2022, Bönen

Softcover, thread-binding, with a text by Kerstin Meincke.

In their work, Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber deal with questions about the structures of cities and the connection between urban and social boundaries. Their photographs show a particular interest in marginalized regions and neighborhoods or those that are stigmatized in the collective perception.
At the same time, their work is less committed to the individual image. Rather, Stuke and Sieber work in series and sequences; they layer, mix, and link material to create multi-layered associations.
Their latest work relates the French capital to the Ruhr region and its imagined center, the Zollverein coal mine, often referred to as the "Eiffel Tower of the Ruhr." Yet neither the Eiffel Tower nor the colliery are the focus of their photographs. Rather, Stuke and Sieber have have juxtaposed the photographs taken along the Périphérique in Paris with places that appear on the Périphérique in Paris, places that refer to the Ruhr region.

This interest in marginalized regions and neighborhoods—or areas that have been stigmatized in the collective perception—figures in many of Stuke and Sieber’s works, which track and amplify the narrative dimensions of these places through the practice of visual mapping. […] This method of questioning, seeking orientation, drifting without any preconceived outcome in mind is a channeling of the concept of the dérive, which goes back to the artist, author, and filmmaker Guy Debord, one of the founding members of the Situationist International. In the mid-1950s, he outlined the “theory of drifting” (Théorie de la Dérive), opening up new ways of seeing urban spaces. On their perambulations, the artists, absorbed by this mindset, often discover unexpected overlaps and connections between places, actions, events, and actors that are geographically and temporally disparate, picking up their trails and weaving them together across national borders. (Kerstin Meincke in: Peripheren)

Order here: https://boehmkobayashi.bigcartel.com/product/peripheren

Pages: 244
Place: Bönen
Year: 2022
Publisher: Kettler
Size: 20 x 28 cm (approx.)