confessions of a mask (I was following a stranger)

Since three years I am working sporadically with people in a mental hospital and there I have started a very personal project with an older woman there. She is deeply obsessed with strange visions and ideas of transformation and hallucinations. I have shared days, weeks and months with and through talks and interviews images emerged in my mind and hers as well so we have started to create settings and were looking for appropiate locations. She started to create masks, dolls and puppets as materialisations of her different personas. The stills and interieurs in this series are a result of intuition and are part of her everyday life as most were shot in her immediate surrounding around her hometown and they are charged (for her) with fear and disaster. I know that this is a very personal view and it is also a departure within my work (or a sideway so to speak), but one full of curiosity and fascination and I am very thankful that she let me being a part of this „real theatre“ of her troubled life. A troubled life which is very rich and intense, but hinders her to take part in our functional world of everyday life. I specifically created this sequence for a projection and see it as a great medium for this series. I have chosen the stark black and white tones as a mean of abstraction and distance, because these images are so personal, absurd and expressionistic that they need this dialectic spin. A portrait of truth through the veiled surface.