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