Die Demokratisierung des Himmels

Die [eng.: the], Demokratisierung [eng.: democratization], des [eng.: of the], Himmels [eng.: sky / heaven]

The Blue Planet – with this term, Juri Gagarin made his mark.
Shortly afterward, NASA satellites sent back the first color photographs of Earth from space.
Since the iconic Blue Marble image traveled around the world,
the sight of our planet has been deeply ingrained in our collective visual memory.
Photography seemed to have fulfilled a promise:
Science used the camera to present an objective image of the Earth.

Die Demokratisierung des Himmels gathers photographic fragments of the blue sky, one for each country on Earth.
These are based on publicly accessible images from Wikipedia articles about each country.
From these, cloud-free sky sections were extracted.
The size of the images corresponds to the population in relation to the exhibition space,
the aspect ratios follow the geographic dimensions of the country,
and the placement is determined by the coordinates of each country's capital.
Photographs that were originally incidental illustrations in the digital space
are detached from their context, emptied, and abstracted to the light refraction of the atmosphere,
transferred into a newly contextualized order.
The readability of the images is dissolved, turning them into a photographic data visualization.
In a time when images circulate in real-time, the work serves as a reminder that photography is never neutral,
it always creates perspective. The sky, seemingly boundless and the same for all,
here becomes a mirror of geopolitical constructions and simultaneously a projection surface for a photographic utopia.