Abandoned Germany

Grand congress hotels from the Socialist era, the once popular Ballhaus often built with basic, functional materials which were not made to last, derelict factories, buildings converted into museums, and barracks now transformed into flats or simply knocked down to make way for solar panels Over 15 urban forays to seek out abandoned places have been undertaken by Aurélien Villette, an international award-winning photographer, and have helped him paint an alternative portrait of contemporary Germany a land scarred by many historical fractures which the passage of time has willingly glossed over, thus remaining only in people's memories.

Auteur
Aurélien Villette is a French photographer born in 1982 in Le Chesnay, near Paris. To him, photography is about travelling. Since the beginning of his career, he has visited more than 45 countries, maintaining an endless curiosity about encountering new societies and histories. His vision of the world is shaped by the motif of ruins. Villette is passionate about those architectural palimpsests, as he likes to call them, in that they represent a key to understanding Humanity. His mesmerising work seems to challenge our notion of heritage. Why were those places abandoned? Should they be conserved? Should we consider them as the failure of people's ambitions, or rather as the transitory state of our History? But more importantly how can looking at our past tell us something about our present? The truth is that what we choose to abandon is a part of who we are it stands as a determinant factor of our collective identity. Halfway between photography and anthropology, his work marks Aurélien Villette as an accomplished artist, and in 2012 he was commended by the jury at the SFR Young Talents Contest.

Échantillon de lecture

In the West and the East, Aurélien Villette has explored abandoned places and buildings dating from before and after the Second World War. By wandering well off the beaten track, he has unearthed fragments of the past which fire our imagination: ballrooms hung with chandeliers that still echo with the carefree steps of lovers drifting in each other's arms, stages adorned with colourful drapes just waiting for the actors to make an entrance, a solitary basketball net hanging proudly in a sports hall, empty churches that have lost nothing of their splendour, an unmade bed in a ransacked bedroom standing witness to a hasty departure with no hope of return. Scattered clues guide us through this enigmatic maze: frescoes in the style of Soviet Realism, an inscription in Russian, slides littering the ground, a flag and a swastika topped with an eagle. All of them set a spectacular, yet
ominous scene. Some are more decayed and difficult to identify than others, and more deeply buried under the rubble. In some places vegetation has taken over again, breathing life into these sleeping worlds that would otherwise have been lost forever. We are taken back in time to the poetry surrounding the ancient remains which fascinated artists and writers of the Renaissance period, and to this strange spectacle staging a slow and silent
metamorphosis,