mascha wansart

Moving to Berlin in my early twenties with one goal: to become who I want to be. Not sure what exactly that means, but I’ll definitely be special.

There’s so much going on around me, I want to become a part of everything. Being unable to pin it down, the arbitrariness of possibilities is gnawing at me. I’m circling around like plastic bags in the wind, a bit here and there. Can’t settle down even though I want to – there is always another possibility or the danger of someone discovering that I don‘t belong here at all.

In the course of time, the tracks of everyday life dig deeper and a stale taste sets in: Is this me now, a product of vague attempts at form and randomly arisen possibilities?

I take photographs in places that are now part of my everyday life – I pass them as soon as I leave the house. In the photos I am present as a flat face without a body, expressionless and passive, created from a biometric passport photo – a portrait that is supposed to show identity, and at the same time generically follow all the rules.

The photos do not show how I came to these places or in what relationship I stand to them. I am a foreign body in a setting that I use, but to which I have contributed nothing – bizarre, but irrelevant.

With my pictures I want to convey a feeling of loneliness, passivity and arbitrariness, which – whether justified or not – often arises within me. At the same time, I ask myself with a touch of self-irony: Who am I to feel sorry for the privilege of freedom?