Angelegenheiten eines Steins
Felix Pacholleck
Angelegenheiten eines Steins is an ongoing project that takes a colonial monument in Leipzig as its starting point. In 1924 the colonial-revisionist group Schutztruppen- und Kolonialverein Leipzig erected a granite erratic boulder as a monument , whose inscription was removed in 1946. Since then the stone has stood unmarked in Wilhelm-Külz-Park, neither commented on nor removed, at once overlooked and exposed, still a official monument.
Working across photography, text, video, and performative installation, the project lets the boulder appear as both a carrier of sedimented histories and an active agent in cultural and political processes. In a fragmentary configuration, speculative, documentary, and performative approaches are brought together to interrogate different modes of image production and to illuminate conditions of visibility, invisibilisation, and historical responsibility. Materialities, media, minerals, silver, and data become legible as intertwined carriers of memory.
Photography is not only the medium of the work but also its subject. The project asks how photographic practice — analogue, digital, and algorithmic — is entangled with extractivism: from the mining of silver to the silicon and computation that drive contemporary image production. It attends to how images fix or release their objects, what they render visible and what remains opaque, and where AI-generated imagery extends or breaks with these colonial image politics.
Across its parts, the work treats the stone less as a fixed object than as a node — between geological time, colonial history, post-war erasure, present-day indifference, and the chain of materials and infrastructures that make image-making possible: silver halides, silicon, code. It produces epistemic frictions, marks gaps, and opens spaces for ambivalence. It does not seek to resolve the stone, but to keep it in question.