175 | 2026

MAURIN DIETRICH

Everything Not Saved Will Not Be Lost

I remember the moment the ground gave way beneath my feet. I was walking in the desert around the Dead Sea on terrain that was riddled with sinkholes. The landscape looked normal but over the years water had been washing away the earth just below the surface and hollowing it out. It couldn’t support a person’s weight and gave way beneath me as I stepped on it. I fell into the hole that opened up beneath me, stumbling and slipping. What appeared solid had only been a surface, and it held as long as no one stepped on it.

Years later, that same sensation and unease came back to me in an archive. I was holding a document that was supposed to prove something, and the longer I held it and studied it, the stronger the sensation became—like a delicate sheet resting on top of an empty space with nothing beneath it. Sinkholes do not form suddenly. Water does its work underground for decades, eating away at the substance while everything above looks unchanged. The moment it caves in only brings to light what has long since disappeared.

In my experience, archives function in a similar way. Their order­­ly appearance—the reference codes, catalogues, and climate-controlled shelves—creates this seemingly intact surface. Only when someone shows up with questions too weighty for the documents’ delicate surface and their claims on representing reality does what has been hollowed out beneath it reveal itself: those who have been erased, the voices the water has carried away, and that which never made it into the system itself. Archives are not mere repositories; they are steeped in intuition, desire, and forgetting. They exist as a series of interconnected decisions: what is considered worth remembering, what counts as a document, and who can access them?

The colonial archive is not merely the result of individual decisions but is rather the sedimentation of past regimes and their continuation by other means. The Colonial Film Unit, founded in 1939 by the British Ministry of Information, produced films in Nigeria and other British colonies to legitimize a particular world order—its own. Its mandate shifted from overt war propaganda to so-called “instructional films” on health, hygiene, and agriculture. […]

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 175/2026, pp. 9–20.

KERVIN SAINT PERE HUARCAYA

Transatlantic Shame

Starting from Didier Eribon’s “honto-analysis”—that form of self-analysis that examines feelings of social shame with respect to one’s origins, class affiliation, and behavioral patterns—in what follows, class-related shame is analyzed based on a photograph, but from a transatlantic perspective.
When I took up my first teaching position at the Berlin University of the Arts, I once again remembered the image of an “educational climber.” This time, however, it was not only questions regarding this category that emerged, but also the shame and the guilt that could clearly be seen in that photograph of me. These emotions helped me understand the concept of “transclasses” (Chantal Jaquet, in the original transclasse), but did not suffice to name the way in which the shame of one’s origin is interwoven with the shame of arriving on the other side of the Atlantic.
What is meant here are educational climbers­: individuals who risk what they did not have in order to obtain access to an education that had been barred to them in their country of origin—unlike those individuals who already come from privileged backgrounds and simply decide to attend a university outside of their country. For the former, the change in class is associated with a twofold exclusion: on the one hand, people from their own countries ask which school they attended in order to locate their social origin—a question that they are barely able to answer, since neither they nor their parents, who worked as security staff or cleaning personnel in precisely those privileged milieus, ever had access to such schools. On the other hand, for “transatlantic educational climbers,” the same logic persists in the surrounding of arrival—a social formation that has cemented itself as an established social class order as a result of colonialism.

I
The journey was determined not by a clear plan but by an objective: university study as a way of escaping the social milieu of one’s origins. During my first crossing of the Atlantic on the way to Europe, the photographs stored between the pages of books came to my mind—the first to be examined after opening the luggage—as well as the increasing distance from my family, friends, and dog, from a world that would not be able to be kept alive much longer. […]

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 175/2026, pp. 21–32.

DARIA BONA

Photography as a Promise

In current research and artistic practice, the understanding of the pho­tographic archive has long since transformed from a place pure­­ly for the preservation of the past into a space for reinterpretion and transformation. Ramona Schacht’s artistic practice also takes this as its starting point: Very much in line with Aleida Assmann’s reflections that the memories and forms of knowledge stored in a material form in archives are reactivated through “active forms of practice, embodiment, and appropriation,”¹ she appropriates historical photographs and makes them accessible and readable to contemporary reconsideration. In doing so, she looks in particular at gaps in the collective visual memory and, in her feminist and media-critical examinations, shows that neither archives nor photographic images are neutral sites, but instead call for critical reflection and need to be continuously reassessed.

In her project Pictures as a Promise (p.a.a.p.) (2022–ongoing), she takes a specific form of image as her starting point: photographs produced as part of the industrial production of textiles in the 1950s and 1960s and showing women at work. In a meticulous search for traces, since 2020, the artist has been combing through various textile archives and subjecting their holdings to analytical considera­tion. Central to her research is the question of which gestures and patterns appear again and again and which recurring pictorial strategies place the female workers in the picture. To this end, she bundles recurring elements that she comes across and develops her own typological compilations in which she highlights individual motifs by editing the historical material. Cropping, details, and enlargements isolate individual portions of the pictures and now draw our attention to specific elements that would otherwise probably catch the eye only on a second look. They are body postures, sequences of movements, sightlines, or details of the clothing and the background, which now stand out in an almost iconographic manner, thus making visible visual arrangements in which collective notions of gender, body, and work are concentrated. […]

1 Aleida Assmann, “Individuelles und kollektives Gedächtnis: Formen, Funktionen und Medien,” in Das Gedächtnis der Kunst. Geschichte und Erinnerung in der Kunst der Gegenwart, ed. Kurt Wettengl, exh. cat. Historisches Museum Frankfurt am Main, in cooperation with the Schirn Kunsthalle, December 15, 2000–March 18, 2001 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000), pp. 21–28.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 175/2026, pp. 33–44.