The Interview

“You look at the streets differently”

Filmmaker Juliane Henrich interviewed Sevrina Giard and Theo Steiner about the project
Jemandsland – about the working method and the personal background of the project.
The interview took place on July 21, 2022 in Berlin.

Juliane Henrich:
When I was leafing through – or rather scrolling through – your book, I was completely enraptured by these moments and situations and arrangements that you found there, which on the one hand have something quite ruthless about them, but on the other hand are also full of poetry and a love of life. And I was a bit reminded of the photo book “The Americans” by Robert Frank, which he photographed in the fifties. Do you think your book could also be read under the heading “The Europeans”? Without having to hang it so high now – do you think your work tells something specific about contemporary Europe?

Theo Steiner:
Well, I do believe that we were traveling in a similar spirit to Robert Frank, because we really wanted to get close to the people, or rather to everyday life. Even with all the coincidences that happen in urban space and that were also very important for Robert Frank’s work.
Gregory Halpern recently said in an interview that his situation as a photographer always reminds him of Marina Abramović’s performance “The Artist Is Present”. Looking at someone calmly and unblinkingly is usually considered rude and intrusive or even threatening behavior. With the Jemandsland project, it was a big concern for us that our looking would be perceived by local people as respectful and curious in an unobtrusive sense.

Sevrina Giard:
We were on the road in eight European cities and wanted to give an insight into people’s everyday lives, to show the different colors of Europe that exist. Of course, these are always just snapshots, because we were only in each city for a short time. But we were able to record a small section of the diversity. However, we were not interested in a stylistic uniformity of the pictures, as with Robert Frank. On our city walks, we also did not focus purely on the depiction of people, but paid very close attention to their signs, images and objects.

Juliane Henrich:
How did the choice of locations actually come about? Why did you go to these places in particular?

Theo Steiner:
We had actually decided early on that it should only be Europe. First of all, it’s the cultural area with which we are most familiar. Then, of course, we had limited time; the trips had to be done in half a year. We took places where we had already been at least once, so where we had a certain prior knowledge.
And with this new project, with these new glasses, we wanted to take another look.
So we thought about: Where in Europe have we both been before? Together or also separately. And that’s how this selection came about.

Sevrina Giard:
The point was to see whether or how such diversity would work for our project, to test whether what we had come up with for the research project would also be visible in this way in these different places. One enters such a city with certain expectations and it was very surprising to see how we now perceive the places anew – with the distance of several years and with the help of the given stories.
For example, we had both been to Athens in the early nineties and eighties, respectively, and the city had changed significantly. Now we had to look: Where can we dock today?
What has happened in the meantime? That was very, very exciting.

Juliane Henrich:
In almost all cities you were not at home, but came as guests, as you write. How did the idea for this project come about in the first place?

Theo Steiner:
This guest status has a lot to do with the Jemandsland concept. In street photography, a lot of sensational images are being created right now, very spectacular moments, dramatic scenes; and a city always acts as a spectacular stage set. Those are wonderful images that come out of that, but we felt like that’s not what we want to contribute. Cities are not always dramatic and spectacular.
We roam the streets together a lot anyway, and that’s where it developed in 2015 on a city walk that we gave each other a theme. Normally you walk through the city and take what catches your eye, what you find interesting. And that’s when this game came about: I’ll give you a little story and you see if you can find something appropriate to it. At the beginning it was just a game, but then we continued with it when we were traveling, for example in Prague, in Venice. And in 2018, we just wanted to see what this method had to offer when we applied it systematically.

Sevrina Giard:
We always gave ourselves topics that on the one hand had something to do with the city, but then also very much with the other person. Ultimately, it was about inviting each other with a theme: Put on these glasses with which you explore the environment. In other words, we formulated a mutual invitation to escape the clichés or our own ingrained habits of seeing. You always have your own themes, how and what you photograph.
And in order to step out of one’s own comfort zone, away from the usual point of view, this invitation was great. You also avoid the danger of classic street photography, those big pictures, those solitary, great shots. There’s a very popular approach in street photography, we always call it the “waiters”: they look for a nice surround, an exciting background, and then sit in wait for hours, watching for someone to walk by, until there’s a good, spectacular photo. That kind of approach doesn’t suit us.
In the Jemandsland project, we work much more narratively. Many images together make up a story or facets of a theme. In the end, it’s not about shooting the ONE photo on the subject, but simply opening up a spectrum and also inviting the audience along on the journey, to simply take a look at the city through our eyes. We are also always striped, that is, we have made mainly drive-by shootings.

Theo Steiner (laughs):
You mean walk-by shootings!

Sevrina Giard (also laughing):
Yes, exactly! That is, we walked through the city and tried to find correspondences, subjective interpretations and aspects of our stories.
In the process, we always set out together to explore the places. That was an exciting togetherness.

Theo Steiner:
We had a nice metaphor for these stories that we gave each other. We used to call them “divining rods.” This invitation to look differently, to look at things differently, was like a divining rod for us, with which we felt our way through the streets. So you walk through the city and look with your eyes completely open and your mind completely open. And you’re constantly fabulating, you’re searching and pondering: Is what I’m seeing something that fits into this story? So that became a whole new way of photographing for us. Sometimes the divining rod twitched and we found something that fit; sometimes we realized after the fact that it was just an error message after all. But basically the method worked really well: You really look at the streets differently, thinking and telling stories.

Sevrina Giard:
It also works on the serendipity principle. You find something that you wouldn’t have expected and looked for in that way. You see things that you wouldn’t have found at all otherwise. Little things jump out at you that you would have otherwise walked past.

Juliane Henrich:
And did a story like that actually crystallize during the residency or had you given each other your mutual triggers beforehand?

Sevrina Giard:
We always gave them to each other before the trip. The task was: what could be a trigger, a story that has the potential to also function as a meta-level? For example, the theme of the Trojan horse, which I gave Theo for Athens. The Trojan is the metaphor for a stratagem of war, a deception. It is a seemingly beautiful or useful object that hides its true purpose.
Theo gave me the theme of the sirens for Athens, which as a symbol, as a divining rod, can stand for quite a lot – for femininity, for an alarm, for advertising. But it was not only important that we went through the city with our trigger stories “open minded”, but that we were always on the road in pairs. This also allowed us to draw each other’s attention to our triggers.

Theo Steiner:
Then it was nice to get a hint: Look, wasn’t that back there interesting for your topic? Sometimes you had overlooked something. Another time you had seen it, but rejected it for certain reasons …
So the selection process happened partly already during the photographing. The next important phase always came in the evening.
Back at the apartment, of course, we sifted through our photos, talked about what we had shot that day. That was the first important feedback. After the trips were completed, there were of course further rounds of feedback, where we sifted through all the material in detail. And finally, probably the most important phase was then the book editing at the end.
That was actually the most important test, a phase in which you think about what is left standing, with what and how do I tell the story or rather: the stories? Does my material tell what I had seen, what I had thought?

Sevrina Giard:
Yes, the evening sifting was already a totally exciting first selection process: show me your favorite pieces; tell me your story about them. And it turned out that some of the finds needed an explanation: What does this photo have to do with the trigger? You often walk around town, take a picture of something, and you don’t know why the dowsing rod struck. It may have simply been due to a feeling or intuition. The evening conversations were thus also about this awareness and reflection on these finds.
After our return, we tried to organize the material, to look for clusters, for example, according to the Wolfgang Tillmans principle, that is, to organize the images associatively. But we got away from that again. Especially through the work on the book, a phase of clarification began and we were able to approach the material anew with some temporal distance.
This also gave rise to the idea of not only presenting the photos and a few accompanying essays, but of supplementing the images with commentaries. Even in this phase, our book designer Tim Siegert was a huge help, because he brought in the view from the outside, from someone who had not been part of the project.

Theo Steiner:
That’s how we came up with the idea of the commentary level, and quite a few of the pictures had a little text added to them; a text that simply tells the situation or something about the neighborhood where this picture was taken.

Sevrina Giard:
Such an accompanying text is not meant to be didactically explanatory at all, but rather to take the audience along on the journey and invite them – as through the images themselves – to look at the journey through our eyes. People look at our material and can see if something is made to resonate with them as a result. Of course, they also get to know the city differently through our gaze, away from the familiar clichés or even away from their own personal experiences. They look at our material and find out if they feel a resonance with what is shown.

Theo Steiner:
Yes, and if there is a resonance with someone, then that person does, after all, tell the story. There are not only the stories that we have given each other as triggers and those that we have found in the cities, but also those that our viewing and reading audience continues to spin.

Juliane Henrich:
And then there’s a longer essay about how a certain picture couldn’t be taken …

Theo Steiner:
This essay deals with a certain experience in Athens, which was not at all directly related to our themes. But this story is meant as an example, because actually there were always pictures on the whole trip that we couldn’t take. Our approach was that we always immerse ourselves as guests in someone else’s country, in a territory that belongs to someone. Those people who live there. Guests come in different forms.

There are trampling tourist hordes, to which we did not want to be counted, and on the other hand there are respectful guests. With our work we wanted to get close to everyday life. But we didn’t want to make images that were disrespectful, that somehow showed people in a bad light. And this essay that you mentioned deals with a particular experience that was extraordinarily powerful for us.

We were in Athens in the market district, where a lot of poor people were out and about, trying to sell something, anything, or their labor.

trying to sell something, anything, or their labor. And suddenly there were three people walking through the street, who had incredibly destroyed bodies and showed a very striking, unusual behavior: with loud shouts and a strangely burned skin. They were running in the middle of the street and then the two men and the woman jumped on a garbage bin at the next intersection and searched it. Everyone else here on this street was suddenly an audience to a spooky scene that totally freaked us out. I had the feeling that none of us knew how to deal with it. We couldn’t even place what their problems were. The way these people looked, they could have been contaminated by combat agents or some drug or whatever. So, I had never seen bodies like that in my life. In such an unusual situation, you could possibly reach for the camera. But at that moment – I’m sure – none of us thought of taking a photo. After all, you don’t take photos of an accident victim you pass by.

In any case, this encounter has haunted us for an incredibly long time, even after the trip. And that’s why we wrote this little essay about it.

But the text is, as I said, exemplary for all the scenes that we didn’t photograph. We are certainly very curious, but wanted to immerse ourselves in people’s everyday lives as unobtrusive guests as possible.

Juliane Henrich:
In your essay you also mention, among other things, this Susan Sontag text “Looking at the suffering of others”. I have now picked up her collection of essays “On Photography” again, where she says, among other things: “Photography is by its very nature an act of non-interference. And I’d be interested to know whether you’ve experienced that as well, or whether there were also situations where you got involved in stories. Or whether there was also the approach of explicitly engaging in conversation with people and collecting stories about that?

Theo Steiner:
Yes, we often got into conversation with people through taking pictures.

Sometimes, when we were out and about in more touristy areas, practically everyone had a camera in front of their nose and we didn’t attract any attention; even when we photographed rather unusual things, not sights. It was different in the quieter areas, in residential areas and so on. People noticed when we photographed things that were not necessarily worthy of being photographed. In such situations, we were often asked about it. People wanted to know, “What are you doing?” Then we told them a bit about our artistic research project, and they actually always found it quite, quite exciting.

Sevrina Giard:
For example, we were out and about in Athens in the craft district where we lived; there was an old plumber’s store whose window was full of all kinds of old plumbing supplies. The owner was surprised, came out and asked us why we were photographing it. “No one has ever photographed my storefront.” We then told him that we found his things great, beautiful and interesting. He was very pleased and that’s how we got into conversation.

Theo Steiner:
What he showed there in the shop window was namely his collection of everyday history, almost something like a small museum. So we learned that he often deals with houses that are demolished afterwards. And in his craftsman’s honor, he just looks at the old connectors, pipes, valves and things like that, which no longer exist today. That’s why he has set up his little museum in the shop window and we have given him the pleasure of having the collection worthy of a look. About such topics, you quickly get into conversation with each other.

Juliane Henrich:
But did you guys ever consider actually doing interviews?

Theo Steiner:
Yes, we had already discussed that as well – with the question of how we locate our method. Our project is first and foremost artistic research; we also talk about aesthetic social research. But in terms of media and methodology, visual ethnography is very close to us.

Visual ethnology works with many different media – with notes, photographs, film recordings, and of course with interviews. We work in a similar way, but to systematically include interviews would unfortunately have exceeded the time frame of our project. We had decided on short stays because we wanted to work in a setting comparable to that of conventional tourist travelers.

With our Jemandsland method, we practice a different approach to a city, but not in the context of a stay of several months, but during the usual duration of a city trip. We were there for a week, ten days, sometimes fourteen days, and accordingly there would not have been time to conduct interviews. We were on the road from morning to night, just to take pictures, to collect all the material. Sevrina also filmed sometimes. And we took notes in between or in the evening.

Sevrina Giard:
Filming also fell a little bit behind, because for film you just need more time. I made little snippets like that, mini-sequences. I would definitely like to spend more time in one place and then also film. And then also to conduct interviews with the people.

Theo Steiner:
But a few small film sequences were made, and a little bit of that also made it into the book – in the form of picture series.

Sevrina Giard:
Yes, there are a few examples. But filming on location would certainly always be exciting, also conducting interviews, in addition to the subject matter. It’s similar to what we do for the magazine Flaneur. The editorial team spends six months in one place and looks at everyday life on one street. We would find it totally exciting to explore a city with our method for a longer period of time.

Theo Steiner:
That would be something for the next impact, doing another Jemandsland project. Of course the trips were physically quite exhausting, but in any case also very productive.

I thought of one more example on the question of interaction with people. Sevrina had a very interesting conversation with a priest on Tinos. She was looking for miracle signs on this island. Behind the sanctuary there were many cars parked by believers, but also by employees of the church. On many rear-view mirrors hung some crucifixes, talismans and lucky charms. She took beautiful photos of them, just through the windshield. Just always the rearview mirror with these little amulets hanging there.

Sevrina Giard:
And then a priest came out and threatened me that he was going to call the police right now if I didn’t stop taking pictures of the cars. I was totally irritated. He was really angry and suddenly went back inside. But then another priest came out right away and dealt with me. He really wanted to call the police until I told him this is a private artistic project. I take pictures of these little good luck charms and talismans in the cars because I think it’s quite charming. They are very personal, little stories that touch me a lot. With that, he was finally reconciled.

Maybe the church employees have had bad experiences with tourist guests? I don’t know and couldn’t really figure out what his problem was. But the conflict had resolved in the end.

Juliane Henrich:
Were there any very personal reasons for you why you wanted to move through these cities in this way?

Sevrina Giard:
Well, I’m totally curious and I’m always strolling through the cities like that. When we go for a walk, I’m always the one walking in the back, picking off or looking at all the leaves.

So walking through the world with the Jemandsland method is just like my other way of walking. I find it very exciting to filter, channel and reflect on places through a specific theme.

And then, of course, I’m a travel fan with a travel gene. I love that mix of photographing and being out in the world. That’s why our Jemandsland expedition was great. It was an intense travel experience. Seeing all these places from certain angles was exciting, new and very insightful.

Theo Steiner:
You’re just a sailor’s kid, too.

Sevrina Giard:
Yes, that’s right. My parents went to sea with the merchant navy before I was born. Every Christmas at home there were always these slide shows of my parents’ voyages from the late sixties, before I was born, to Cuba, Syria and the Norwegian fjords. And we sat through them as children with weeping hearts. After all, I grew up in East Germany, which meant that these wonder places were very difficult to reach, and only in a roundabout way.

I looked at these slides and thought: I want to go there! For us children, there were vacation trips to our grandparents on the Baltic Sea, sometimes to Saxony or Czechoslovakia.

But then came the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now I was allowed to travel and all these longings of my childhood I could live out all at once.

My first trip was also to Greece, because as a child I read Homer’s Iliad like a book of fairy tales and actually wanted to find these places again from the reading. But of course I didn’t find this idealization of Greece. Athens was insanely dirty, full of smog, and I was very, very disappointed by the comparison with the image of Greece I had formed as a child. But at least I was on the road, could see everything for myself and was eventually reconciled. My childhood dream came true.

Theo Steiner:
I have a somewhat different background, because I grew up in Austria, and travel was certainly not forbidden or generally severely restricted. However, I grew up in a potted-plant milieu. At most, I traveled during the vacations.

There were summer vacations with my mother, which then went mostly to Italy or Hungary, so in nearby countries. When I grew up, my first “independent” trips took me to Venice and Athens.

But travel had another, more difficult facet in my family. I grew up listening to stories from which I realized that the grandparents’ generation essentially came to “travel” through World War II. It was only through the warlike conquests that the men got out, went to North Africa, Greece or Russia, and were killed or imprisoned there. Many women were also carted across Europe in war service.

These were scary topics for me as a child, and they were always negotiated in this generation. In addition, even apart from these war-related upheavals, my family was very strongly tied to the Scholle anyway. Maybe that’s why I didn’t perceive travel as something positive and had to earn my freedom to travel, so to speak. I first had to unlearn my potted plant habit.

But in the meantime I also like to travel and find it exciting to explore other places. And in a project like Jemandsland, I can combine this with my personal interests in a great way. I am a very curious person. It’s not for nothing that I came to photography, and curiosity also combines nicely with my work as a design theorist. Through my design and media studies work for the degree program, I have to deal a lot with visual cultures, after all, or with people’s material culture.

Sevrina Giard:
We not only photographed and collected for our triggers on the trips, but also photographed a lot of “bycatch,” as the seafaring kid in me would say now. In addition to the trigger themes, we also found a lot of atmospheric stuff. Pictures that didn’t make it into the book, but are still the results of our journey and flanked our project. We also collect images for our archives.

For my work, especially for theater productions, where I build video stage sets, or for media installations, I always need a lot of material to convey ideas. So I’m constantly filling my archive of visual interpretations, which I can then cast into specific forms as needed, or incorporate into larger works as set pieces and short visual statements.

Juliane Henrich:
Theo, since you mentioned earlier that you also teach and deal with visual cultures in the broadest sense …

Was the production of the Jemandsland book also a statement that is a bit directed against this Instagram culture, where you just have the quick pictures in your timeline? A lot of your images are very focused, but there were also snapshot-like images that you could find in a similar form on Instagram. But you decided to present the results of your project as a book in this concentrated form.

Theo Steiner:
Yes, the presentation in book form was a very conscious decision, because it was important to us that we take our time to present the results. Of course, as I said, we were only in these cities for a relatively short time, but we always made very intensive use of the days, whether seven, ten or fourteen: We really left in the morning and then were always on the road all day until the evening. Sometimes, if we had enough energy, we even went out again after dinner, into the early night.

We took a lot of time to look and to search. And when it came to the question of how to present our results, it was very important to us to give the audience the opportunity to participate in this journey in some way and to take time for it. The selected images should not just flit through quickly on an Instagram feed.

The great thing about a photo book is that it’s there as an object, that you can look at it in peace; and that’s how the stories can develop.

That’s why we don’t primarily work with individual images. It’s not about that one very special picture that we’ve been waiting for for six hours. It’s about telling the story. Better said: that the story is told from the found material. And of course the story is told out of the series, that is, out of the juxtaposition of the various images. A little trigger story is at the beginning and with it in mind I take pictures through the city – in different streets at different times. I get certain results by chance and in the end something new is put together from my selection of images and through the comments I add to them.

You need time for all these processes. The medium of the book is ideal for that.

Sevrina Giard:
A book simply invites you to slow down. You take a page and turn it, you touch it, it has a haptic component. You can build relationships between images, a good design supports the reception. The book has a certain dramaturgy. I think these kinds of stories we tell, they’re more suited to a book than a social media channel.

However, you could place accompanying marketing measures on Insta, for example pictures of the creation of the book, or accompany the later distribution of the book. That’s what this channel works for. But to engage with a story, with a topic, you need time. When you scroll through the Insta feed, it has to be a photo where you stop, which brings us back to the topic of “solitary spectacular street photography.”

And that’s not our approach at all, we want you to engage with the story, to engage in self-reflection, to look at what does this do to me? It’s not about producing a beautiful aesthetic quick fix, but rather about dealing with the subject, with the images, or simply with yourself in the best case.

What I also find important is that with the Insta Feed, it ultimately doesn’t matter what has just happened. You’ve already forgotten what you’ve seen, because it only targets the short-term memory, the ultra-short-term memory. You see something and then it’s already gone.

When you scroll through, it’s overlaid again by new stories.

Juliane Henrich:
So did you usually know right away: this image is it? Or were images often only set by friction with others or by the next moment when another image came along?

Did the photos grow as a series of images, so to speak?

Sevrina Giard:
That’s interesting what you say, because we actually developed a certain kind of composition as we worked through the material.

With a lot of the pictures, you knew when you were taking them: This is it! Then, while sorting, we also rediscovered images that only worked in conjunction with others. They were reinforcements, additions, facets or counterpoints, so that the narrative of the sub-theme becomes visible.

Theo Steiner:
One must perhaps also briefly emphasize here that what we are showing now is a selection. There are images in the archive that could legitimately be included in the book. But at some point we had to make certain restrictions in terms of scope alone, because otherwise the book would no longer be manageable.

Sevrina Giard:
We now show about twenty images per location and theme, sometimes a bit more. The selection is always exemplary. What fits in this place or what relates to each other. You also have to think about in what kind of order do you build everything up?

For the Sirens in Athens, for example, the first image I found was the Frida Kahlo mural, and I immediately thought: that fits. Frida Kahlo with the two pistols in her hands. I then flanked the whole thing with a quote. So now I had this great picture and had to ask myself: Where does this actually go? So that our book also has a certain dramaturgy, so that there is a great narrative arc.

The development of the book was actually a cinematic work, so that we could take the audience on our journey.

Juliane Henrich:
And your book, after all, can always be read from both sides at once and put together as you look at it …

Sevrina Giard:
We were always thinking: What should we use for the cover? Our book designer then came up with the wonderful idea of the two title beginnings. After all, we also wanted to convey that Jemandsland is a project by both of us.

So which city trip do you start with and where do you end? We decided on two covers, two beginnings, so that the interpretation of the view of our world is equal. Otherwise it would always be a weighting. Who starts, who ends? The thing with the two book beginnings is, of course, also a very exciting story in terms of design, as a symbol of the journey we have made in partnership.

Theo Steiner:
I can start with the Sevrina Giard cover and flip through three cities with six themes to the middle. Then I have to turn the book over once and can do the Theo Steiner entry from the other side, with a different cover image, and I get to the other three cities with their six themes. We immediately liked this idea immensely, because in this way the book clearly reflects the basic constellation of the project, which is after all essential for the project.

Sevrina Giard:
The fact that the book has two beginnings implies another, quite wonderful consequence: the book or the journey has no end with it either!

Juliane Henrich:
I’m really looking forward to actually leafing through the book.

Theo Steiner:
We’re also really looking forward to this wonderful experience, because the book will be an artistic and well-designed object. Working with the designer Tim Siegert was also really great and he helped us very well to convey these stories we want to tell in book form.

Juliane Henrich:
With these images, you tell about your special encounters with certain cities or places at certain moments. Do you think that the viewers and readers can share this view with you?

Sevrina Giard:
Absolutely, absolutely. The book with its images and texts is an invitation.

Both of us have set out on a journey, have taken different perspectives with our trigger stories to look at the world. And in the same way we now invite the audience to make this journey with us. The book is an offer: Look, where do resonances arise with you?

Theo Steiner:
We have always taken pictures when history and the city have coincided and thereby made something resonate in us. In other words, when the city responded to the dowsing rod story, so to speak. Now we hope that our personal resonance experiences are comprehensible to the audience through the images and texts.

Sevrina Giard:
We showed the pictures to many people in the circle of friends in advance to see what feedback came back. We realized that some of the pictures might not be self-explanatory and that our stories were a wonderful complement to them. That’s why there are also several comments on the photographs in the book.

Theo Steiner:
It was an important learning process for us that people naturally want to know how we arrived at these images. We took away an incredible amount from the conversations we had with our friends, which enabled us to present the material in the way we do now.

Juliane Henrich:
I was thinking earlier that you guys were traveling just ahead of the pandemic.

Probably other cities would be interesting for you by now. Are there destinations that you would still like to travel to in order to continue the research?

Theo Steiner:
Yes, we haven’t thought about that at all yet, because we were really busy evaluating the archive and producing this book. But clearly, the next trip would certainly be different. Because the world has changed a bit. But most of all, it would be different because we learned so much through the project.

It was a research project, really artistic research in the broadest sense. We went into it with a lot of thought, with a lot of planning and preparation. But of course, not everything happened the way we thought it would at the beginning. And in the cities we learned a lot. In the beginning, I walked the streets and thought: I can’t find anything to go with my story. On the second day, things got a little better, and on the third day, I was finally in the topic. That means that if we were to set up a new project like this, we would be different people and would probably do certain things differently.

Juliane Henrich:
And what’s next for the project?

Theo Steiner:
We would totally feel like just touring a city or two cities a bit longer and see what we would find in such a long engagement. Now that we’ve learned so much in the first Jemandsland round. But it would also be fascinating to see what comes out if we examine all of Europe as a Jemandsland. Juliane, you mentioned Robert Frank’s “The Americans” at the beginning … If you were to apply the Jemandsland method to cities in all European countries, then this research could really become something like “The Europeans” …

Sevrina Giard:
I would also like to extend our Jemandsland project to the Asian and American regions, gladly for a longer period of time.

Theo Steiner:
And it would be great to try it out with students, in a workshop, because the Jemandsland method, it already has potential and this attempt to approach a new view via a given story could be a great stimulus for students, I think.

Sevrina Giard
It would also be interesting to see how you can convey all these stories in an exhibition. You see: there are quite a few options. In any case, I would like to go out into the world again and continue working and photographing there. And really continue our research.

Hoist the sails and keep going.