Torsten Hattenkerl – Allmineral

Fotohof 2014

Text: David Sitter
Language: German, English
Ed: Marta Pohlmann-Kryszkiewicz
Design: Luise Bartels

Basic elements of globalized working and living environments processed photographically:
An artistic study of the situation of everyday things using the example of production sites scattered around the world with machines from the company allmineral and, in addition, a photo atlas of late modern living conditions.

For eleven years, the photographer Torsten Hattenkerl has traveled to production sites scattered around the world where machines from the company allmineral, specialists in the processing of gravel, sand, coal and ore, are in operation.
With his ethnographic-biographical and artistic-documentary perspective on the one hand, Hattenkerl traces visible structures and characteristics in a sober and at the same time sensitive and empathetic way, and with his photographs captures the interdependencies of working and living conditions, natural and artistic landscapes, leisure and leisure activities of the workplaces, the mechanical and the cultural technology, which flow together in companies like allmineral. He shows us harsh landscapes on the fringes of urban civilization, which are also the places of origin of the resources and thus also inevitably the embeddedness of the machinery and the processes encroaching on the landscape and the soil, because almost every natural landscape has already been cultivated for a long time and that even far away from the big cities.
Using the multi-layered editing methodology of the artist and art historian Marta Pohlmann-Kryszkiewicz, Hattenkerl’s work seems almost analogous to the concrete activity of the allminerals separation process, to record, collect, sort and finally to sort the premises of the factories and the natural-artificial environment around them recombine.
The texts of the book, written by the media theorist David Sittler, increasingly enter into a constructive tension and a dialogue with the images and their viewers and possibly their own experiences, since they are conceived less as image interpretations and more as an independent metaphorical textual fabric that creates a dialogical interaction with the pictures.. The book was designed by Luise Bartels.