2024
still stand leer steht still
This body of work explores vacancy and the politics of living in my hometown Vienna through personal experience. It reflects on memory, loss, and how spaces change.
It all started with a simple idea: to photograph the front doors of the houses I had lived in. Collecting flats has become like filling a sticker album: one after another, never
permanent.
Very soon, this act of tracing my own housing history revealed a larger story — one about the worsening housing situation in Vienna, a city once known as the capital of
social housing. Rents are rising, tenancy durations are being shortened, and more and more apartments remain vacant while waiting for renovation and higher returns.
During my visits, I encountered the remains of my own past. Behind one door, I looked through the peephole and saw the furniture of my childhood room, unchanged since my family was forced to leave. The apartment has stood empty ever since.
In another, I entered the space where I had lived with my father and brother thirteen years ago — now in the process of being cleared out. I photographed it frantically, to make it my own one last time.
These photographs come together with images from my father’s Facebook archive to form still stand leer steht still.
In my surroundings, it is common to find abandoned spaces and to repurpose them into homes. I realized that this way of inhabiting a place makes one attentive not only to the present history of a location. On the one hand, you live
in a space whose structures you must adapt to, and on the other, you know it will look completely different once you move out. Or not exist at all. The question is how much time will pass before that process begins.
I took a picture of a lamp.
I saw a picture of a lamp.
Why does it hurt?
Because it was a home.
And it could have been one thirteen years longer.