Being in isolation is a strong limitation of space: The world is closing in, to a few square meters of my bedroom, taking me hostage and restricting my encounters to online zoom meetings.

But while this claustrophobic situation might lock us in a limited physical space, we still have the opportunity to create new, imaginary spaces. Though divided between the distance between Berlin and Munich, Nikolai and I are opening-up this transitional space, by exchanging one image every day as an answer to the previous picture.

The apertures of our cameras are creating a rapture in the border between the inside and the outside, like a door to the forbidden outside world. So even though taken in different cities, the images begin to exist in the same fictional realm, creating an impossible narrative connecting our both lives.

The space between - selection

Being in isolation is a strong limitation of space: The world is closing in, to a few square meters of my bedroom, taking me hostage and restricting my encounters to online zoom meetings.

But while this claustrophobic situation might lock us in a limited physical space, we still have the opportunity to create new, imaginary spaces. Though divided between the distance between Berlin and Munich, Nikolai and I are opening-up this transitional space, by exchanging one image every day as an answer to the previous picture.

The apertures of our cameras are creating a rapture in the border between the inside and the outside, like a door to the forbidden outside world. So even though taken in different cities, the images begin to exist in the same fictional realm, creating an impossible narrative connecting our both lives.




The space between - Thread 2

The space between - Thread 1



"Path of Pins” is a personal, indefinite visual retelling of Red Riding Hood, revolving around the awakening of the primordial and archaic feminine. I use the aspect of retelling and the fluid character of fairy tales to develop new narrative structures, deviating from one universal truth and opening up to a variety of interpretations.

 

In one of the earliest oral versions of the fairytale, which later inspired Charles Perrault to write his ‘Petit Chaperon Rouge’, the wolf asks the unnamed heroine: “Which path will you take?”, to which she responds with her decision to take the path of pins, the more careless and fleeting one – as opposed to the path of needles, the irreversible way of the wolf.

 

This metaphor of pins and needles also relates to how fairy tales are being circulated and treated: Like a butterfly collector, Perrault kills the living, ever-evolving oral tale, in order to present it to the reader in a pose he artificially forced upon it: Not only does he appropriate the story, but he tortures the heroine with his own ideology. While in the early variant of the narrative the heroine tricks the wolf and escapes with artfulness and the help of washerwomen and the forces of nature, Perrault reduces her to a naive girl, and even blames her for her own violation.

 

Through the fluid character of the fairy tale, I want to retell the story without pressing it into a static form: While the photograph is indeed a fixed moment, the interpretation of it, as well as the before and after, is open, and can therefore change. Within and between the images, I want to send the heroine on a new journey, into the darkness, the subconscious, offside the path, to discover her feminine identity through the play adults often unlearn.


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Nadja Ellinger