Visby — Gotland I

A gable falls across this wall, and the roof it belongs to is somewhere behind me. The shadow lies flat over the render and lets every crack show through it. Below, a dark plinth cuts the wall clean across; at the right, a tree throws its own shadow — the one soft form among the straight ones.

The colour is not the wall’s. It is shifted afterwards — a decision, not a record. What the camera found was the geometry and the light crossing it; what I changed was the temperature at which you read them.

The render here has been repaired more often than it was built, and the flat shadow shows every seam of it. A dark plinth runs along the bottom, the shadow of a tree moves across the lower half, and the gable’s edge stays hard from one side of the frame to the other. A medieval town, and none of its history legible — only its maintenance.

Visby, on the island of Gotland — one of two works made in that town. Part of Fremde Fassaden, an ongoing series of colour-shifted façades made in Berlin, with detours to Duisburg, Visby and Douglas. See the second Visby work and the others made beyond Berlin.