Open publication spread showing black cover and silvery pages with architectural imagery and typography.
Open book spread with abstract architectural image on left and classical engraving on right.
Open book spread with blank left page and black and white photograph of stairs carved into a mountain on right page.
Misty forest landscape with fallen logs spread across two facing pages of an open book.
Open book spread with two black and white artworks: left page shows a figure drawing, right page displays abstract graffiti-like marks and text.
Open book displaying a black and white photograph of a large open space covered with cobblestone.
Open book showing blank left page and black and white photograph on right page of a baroque mirror and paintings of royalty in its reflection.
Open book displaying two black and white architectural photographs side by side.
Open book publication displaying black and white photograph of angular architectural form against white page.
Open book with blank left page and black and white photograph of a wooden plank leading over a creek on right.
Bare tree stands alone in vast, flat agricultural landscape, black and white photograph.
Open book displaying black and white landscape photograph of open landscape with large shadows across two pages.
Open publication spread showing a white house with boarded windows and smoke damage above them in black and white.
Open book showing two black and white photographs of urban interior spaces with graffiti and architectural details.

This Soil We Have Created For Ourselves

This Soil looks at Germany as a landscape haunted by its own history. The project traces the echoes of bygone myths, ideologies, and utopias through sites of memory, museums, and monuments, where the past is preserved, shaped, and presented as history, and through the everyday surroundings of German towns and villages.

At a time when calls for national identity and a clearly defined Heimat have grown louder, the work confronts the nationalist myth of a sacred homeland: the notion, common to all nationalisms, that a land has belonged to a people since time immemorial. The shadows of the past take on new form here, encroaching, unresolved, never fully closed. The project asks what this complicated relationship to history means for the present, and what potential it holds for Germany's future.

“This Soil is an investigation of sites of memory and yet its strength lies in not relying on a linear re-telling of events. It invites us to sense the significance of what we see before us and in doing so, attempts to strike a difficult balance between bringing attention to Germany’s dark past, while also refusing to give it honour or pay homage.” — Lucy Rogers, C4 Journal

“Jonas Feige’s This Soil We Have Created for Ourselves suggests that history is both an echo and a shadow. The artist photographs his native Germany, his Heimat, with a deeply poetic sensibility. Beneath the beauty of Feige’s images lies the suggestion that history remains incomplete, and that the echoes of the past are not fading but growing louder.” — Brad Feuerhelm

published by Kominek Books in 2021