About

»Cartographie dynamique« is a virtual network connecting cities in Japan, Germany, France, China or India with the distinctive photographic works created in each location. Thematic filters are added into the mix, among them Protest, Anarchism, Olympia, Expo, Love Parade, Z.U.S.(Zones urbaines sensibles), and Péripherique. These specify some of the unique features of these cities as well as comparable structural elements that they share, which act, for the most part, as catalysts for revolutionary urbanistic developments. This network originated fifteen years ago, with »Japanese Lesson« (2005), a body of work drawn from a wide range of private and appropriated image sources that has been continually expanding ever since. Beginning as an exuberant visual grammar consisting of shots of the city, portraits, and manga, steeped in the melancholy of the already antiquated hyper-modernity of Japanese “electric towns,” it afforded a more acute view of Europe’s urban structures and evolved via photographic peregrinations through the city into applied psychogeography.

The organization of the »Cartographie dynamique«as a network gives the desultoriness of Sieber & Stuke’s photographic dérives new possibilities of comparison and grants their repeating structures a logical inevitability. The cartography even generates ideas for new ways of mapping urban spaces, as is evident in Sieber & Stuke’s Walk the Walk, which trans-poses the local route from their flat in Düsseldorf to their studio, mapping it street by street onto a new neighborhood in the twinned Chinese city of Chongqing.

Even if today, in a globalized and automated world, the causes of social disruption can be attributed more and more to the invisible mechanisms of economic and political processes, they find visible expression in the physical world of our cities. (Florian Ebner, for »Dec 8 2018, La Ville Lumière«, GwinZegal / Böhm Kobayashi 2021)

Cartographie Dynamique« contains of several series and works of different volume. Some chapters excist as books, artist books in a small edition or unique maquettes. Several works appear as wall-pieces, grids of images, some are extensive installations of photographs and others exist as video-installations. And some are still „work in progess“.

Different chapters of Cartographie Dynamique have been exhibited/published:
2023 »Le Monde de Demain. A Prologue« Böhm Kobayashi
2022 »Chongqing Express« Stiftung Zollverein / Ruhrmuseum Essen
2022 »Chongqing Express« Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, Kunsthalle Mannheim
2022 »Peripheren, Verlag Kettler
2022 »Peripheren« Fotofabbrica Prize/Festival Diecixdieci
2021 »Sequence as a Dialogue, Ruins of the Future« Zine Böhm Kobayashi
2021 »Indian Defense« Cennail Photo Biennale
2021 »La Ville Lumière« im Rahmen von »Place Internationale« FFT Düsseldorf
2021 »North of Mikawashima« with Takano Ruydai, Photopaper 66/67
2021 »Paris Dec 8, 2018, La Ville Lumière« Gwin Zegal Editions
2020/21 »Sanya/Japanese Lesson« and »Walk the Walk« Museum Morsbroich
2020 »Shin Sekai, Neue Welt« Zine Böhm Kobayashi
2019 »Japanese Lesson« Kunsthalle Gießen
2019 »Japanese Lesson – Fotografie neu ordnen« Museum Kunst & Gewerbe Hamburg

@Katja Stuke & Oliver Sieber, Düsseldorf
www.krautphotographer.org