Hit the bull eyes

"After Fertilisation" moves poetically, melancholy, with a tendency to morbid. I see my work as a kind of poetry, guided by the narrative's various symbols. Every photograph triggers a certain feeling that becomes whole when combined with the others. As a lingering inspiration, the work always reminds me of Robert Bresson's 1966 film. "Au Hasard Balthazar" is one of the films that have moved me the most so far. Just like in Bresson's film, "After Fertilisation" started with a donkey I ran into during my Studio Vortex Artist Residency in Arles 2019. This encounter laid the foundation for this series and still makes me ponder. The dead-end of evolution and the resulting isolation inspires me about animal hybrids - freaks of nature without their kind. For me, the sense of this crossbreed symbolises deep pain and incompleteness - the point of retreat. When I saw "Au Hasard Balthazar" for the first time, it evoked precisely this pain of living in me. All the emotions I tried to suppress. It's just a movie about a donkey. Yet it managed to shake me more than any movie ever had before. A donkey's subject can be more violent than any other drama about human beings. The movie's language is so radical that it is impossible to escape its existential force. So, quickly a film can be about the essential, about the essence of life or life itself. Human beings and animals are both exploited, tortured, and suffering as creatures. Balthazar stands eye to eye with tigers, polar bears, monkeys, and elephants in one particular scene. It seems as if they want to express their suffering to him through simple eye contact. They are marked by their captivity and the cold steel of the cages. There is sadness in their blink, which renders them human.