Vera Drebusch
Vera Drebusch, born in 1986, explores contemporary history through her photography, text, and media works, focusing on its "updating" in the form of personal memories and testimonies. Their significance arises from the intersection of individual life stories and historical events, much like the knot of a loop.
By querying people in her environment who belong to the generation that consciously experienced the Chernobyl reactor accident in 1986, she receives statements such as, "You mustn't open your mouth when you go outside." These statements embody the abstractly drastic nature of the distant event and translate it into concrete experiences that can be empathized with. Statements that directly affect the body (for example, those related to eating or breathing) even have the power to make empathy almost unavoidable. Among these experiences that Drebusch brings into the present is the notion that certain foods, deemed particularly susceptible to radiation, should not be consumed. The chocolates she offers to gallery visitors are made with ingredients that were "forbidden" at the time. The fact that they consist of harmless ingredients is ultimately a matter of trust.
Drebusch's jams and juices, made from fruits that have grown on the grounds of Bonn's embassy in distant countries, similarly target abstract historical and political agreements in a physical (and thus unavoidable) way, specifically agreements regarding political territories. The land where the plants grow is politically and legally owned by the exotic (and conflict-ridden) countries of Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, even though the well-to-do, democratically governed motherland of Bonn is just meters away. The abstract classification of a territory based on contracts always also involves the materiality of the earth, which is an immediate bodily component of the people living from it.
Her own biography becomes a topic in 2013 when Vera Drebusch travels to Bogotá for six months and meets the artist Andrés Baron, who is the same age as her. The two compare their family histories back to their grandfathers' generation and discover striking similarities, which they ultimately process into the artist book 9256.122km by blending old family photo albums together.
During her time in Bogotá, Drebusch also encounters the radio program "Las voces del secuestro" ("Voices of Kidnapping"), which broadcasts news from relatives of kidnapped individuals every Sunday night between midnight and 6:00 AM, hoping that the kidnapping victims will hear these messages at their unknown locations. In the installation "Geisel-Radio," which consists of a commemorative stone (Levanto Rosso) veined with red and a sound/transmitter installation, the artist recounts her experience with this "Geisel-Radio" and how she came to learn about it.