THERE, NOT THERE: The work of Gesche Würfel
A guest essay by Paul Clemence
How do we cope when we lose someone, or something, but their presence is still felt at a deep level? Or when that thing, or person, is here, but their essence is not?
PhD therapist and author Pauline Boss has deeply researched that contradiction, coining the term “ambiguous loss.” Her research and writing shed some much-needed insight into the topic. “In the world of unresolved grief, there is a unique kind of loss that complicates grief, confuses relationships, and prevents closure. I call it ambiguous loss,” Boss defines.
The concept applies to when a person is physically absent (dead, missing, kidnapped) but the ones left behind stay emotionally connected to a critical degree. But it can also be applied the other way around—when a person is present in body, but not emotionally or intellectually, as is the case with cognitive degenerations like the many varieties of dementia, brain injury, addictions, or simply personality handicaps.
Regardless of what brings about this condition, grief and the desire for closure can be very challenging, especially in a society used to the concept of “mastery,” where if we work hard enough on something, we are able to “master” it. In this case, the ambiguity of the circumstances makes that task extremely difficult, leading to a lingering feeling of sorrow. “To cope with uncertain losses, we must first temper our hunger for mastery. This is the paradox,” Boss says. “Closure is a myth. For the rest of your life, you are accommodated to the loss. You integrate it into your life. You grow around it,” she explains. She goes on to suggest that instead of closure, we should search for “meaning and new hope.”
As has been well established, we usually have a deeper understanding of an idea when that knowledge comes to us through our feelings, which is one of the greatest gifts of any expression of art. So naturally, art can be the perfect channel through which to look for meaning and hope.
That was the case for artist Gesche Würfel in one of her recent projects. In her new book, The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall, Würfel transforms that yearning for closure into inspiration, showing us that unresolved loss can also relate to a sense of place. She does that by applying her refined photographic sensibilities to grasp the “there/not-there“ emotional dichotomy implied in both the rise and the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall and the psychological turmoil it left behind.
“In 1987, as a child, I stood in front of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate while traveling with my family to West Berlin. The Wall’s size and presence left a lasting impression on me,” recalls Würfel. That infamous, lengthy wall was built to be a physical barrier in a halved city, but it also served as an underlying and powerful subliminal message of a division of culture, beliefs, and ways of living. Its eventual demise when the Germany reunification took place was supposed to erase that split, but after 28 years of separation there were profound scars left, and that erasing was bound to not happen so easily.
“I had long meant to work on a project addressing German reunification after 1990, but it wasn’t until fall 2020 that my ideas took shape in the form of a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) proposal,” explains Würfel. “Although Germany had now a single political and economic system, new divisions and hostilities have emerged during reunification. My goal was to probe those divisions through photography, guided interviews, and archival images of the wall.”
The first, conceptual part of the book features 61 composite images. During her artist residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, she biked along the Berlin Wall Trail and paused every 2.8 kilometers (1.7 miles)—in a nod to the Wall’s 28-year history—to capture the current state of the separation line in Berlin and Brandenburg. “Starting and ending at the Brandenburg Gate, I took six photos at each location: front, back, left, right, sky, and ground. Later, I combined these six images in Photoshop to represent the layers of Berlin’s history,” Würfel adds, explaining her process.
The resulting images are at once poignant and beautiful, with her layering creating a certain impressionistic effect, but one that goes beyond just a pleasing aesthetic to also make a poignant comment on the multitude of perspectives and consequences created by both the establishment of the wall and its symbolic disappearance. Image “106.4 km,” for example, shows how well these elements combine (buildings, grounds, cars, trees, and sky) to express a point of view, but without portraying an actual physicality, relying instead on silhouettes, abstraction, graininess, and a subtle watercolor-like palette that suggests a certain remoteness and fragility that perfectly reflects the ambivalence being witnessed.
As Würfel herself states:
“The photos of the architecture, the nature, and the people allowed me to identify spaces where the Wall’s remnants remain, where its physical division has ceased to exist, and where its mental construct continues to persist.”
Her words remind us that as much as cities and buildings are man-made, constructed realizations, cities and buildings are also living beings, and thus they have their own histories, cycles, functions, characters, highs and lows, apogees, and decay. And that will shape us in varying degrees according to our own personal history and relation to them.
In the end, whether it is a person, a loved one, a community, or a place, our sense of their presence or absence will depend on our connection to and interpretation of their role in our journey and lives, and that, for better or worse, will never be clearly defined, evolving throughout time as we ourselves evolve and grow.
About the author
Paul Clemence is an artist, photographer, writer, and curator exploring the intersections of design, art, and architecture. His work has been exhibited internationally, from Milan Design Week and Art Basel/Design Miami to the Venice Architecture Biennale. Widely published across architecture and design media, Clemence is also the founder of Archi-Photo, a global architecture photography community with over one million followers. Originally from Rio de Janeiro, he now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
 | A guest post by
|