Postcards from Europe 10/14

work from the ongoing archive

Eva Leitolf

Since 2006, Eva Leitolf has been searching Europe’s outermost borders for places where the larger issue of migration manifests itself in concrete conflicts on an individual level. The locations documented by the artist in the course of her ongoing archival work, titled Postcards from Europe, are former crime scenes or ongoing hotspots of racially motivated violence and other actions that are unacceptable from a humanitarian standpoint. In contrast to a journalistic approach, the artist’s photographs of these sites show mostly empty places devoid of any traces of the perpetrators, victims, or the crime itself. Instead, she augments each photograph with her own sober account of the event. In doing so, Leitolf takes an approach that rejects photography’s interpretative sovereignty as singular, objective testimony, insisting instead on its dependence on context and textual documentation. In this regard, Leitolf places photography at the centre of the discourse concerning the medial construct of society together with all its informal and structural processes.