2021-12-20 FOCUS ON: Claire Laude

We are pleased to welcome Claire Laude in Malmö Fotobiennal 2021. Claire Laude body of work is dealing with transition and in-between spaces. What is implemented in the manifestation of cities architecture in Kaliningrad and Königsberg?

(…) text from website: My work deals with the construction and representation of the memory of a place.

I choose sites that are transformed, in danger of disappearing, or being forgotten for example the city of Königsberg/Kaliningrad or an abandoned military reserve. Their redevelopment, reconstruction, destruction and/or appropriation are focal points of my research.

Kaliningrad can be characterized by the word ‚between’, a state of transition and in-between. Constructed on the destruction of another town, enclave between Europe and Russia, the city is separated by two ideologies, a russian and a german and/or european one. Between an unknown equation – a few people in Europe know how to situate this town- and a negative reputation – Kaliningrad is the ugliest city in the world- the reconstruction of the lost town Königsberg represents an ideal to pursue. The recent urbanist competitions search for proposals that integrate the histories of both Kaliningrad and Königsberg.

In Kaliningrad, I got attached to photographing informal situations and structures that testify this transitory state or that show how individuals adapt to the situation, a residual architecture. Everything that is constructed in a casual way is a silent reflection of a society‘s relationship with their building. I hence photographed self-build structures, sheds, construction sites, scaffoldings, vague grounds, reinvested areas that had been destroyed. I was searching for a state of limits, traces of both a presence and it’s disappearance.
external site
http://www.clairelaude.de

CLAIRE LAUDE (b. 1975, France), architect & artist living in Berlin. 

With her project ‚Ephemeral Intersects‘, she won the First Prize Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019, in the Category Space, Architecture & Conflicts.

A text and some pictures have were published in 2019 in a trilogy of books „The Red Utopias“ by Editions Essarter, that brings together different authors and photographers around the theme of political utopias in Europe in a post post-soviet era. 2019 was she one of the selected artists for the SÅM Lessinia Residency, curated by Rafal Milach and Ania Nalecka-Milach. In 2018 she received the Project’s Scholarship ‘Mach den Kiosk 2018 Herr Fleischer e.V.‘‚ to realize a public installation in a kiosk in Halle (Saale). 2017 she was resident at the Kaunas photography Gallery in Kaunas and in 2016 she took part in the program’s exchange and residency between Lukas Künstlerhaus, Ahrenshoop and NCCA, Kaliningrad.

Since 2020, she is a member of Pilote Contemporary Berlin.  pilote

Claire Laude made an interview with Wladimir Gilmanow, doctor of philology and professor at the Baltic Federal University Immanuel Kant in her first artist residency in Kaliningrad in September 2016: (…)
– First, to be honest,
I found it quite difficult
Several years ago
To wear this ruthless judgment …
Königsberg is dead.
A painful observation for me.
Now I’m of that opinion again
Königsberg is dead
Even if, after the fall of the Wall,
Despite this inconstant and murderous fate,
I had this hope that Königsberg would survive,
At the same time in the unspeakable
And through the painful architecture of ruin. ” (Free translation from French)
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