The Wall

Uittreksel

Photographic journey along the Atlantic Wall. For three years, Annet van der Voort (born in the Netherlands, lives and works in Drensteinfurt, Germany) travels to European coastal regions in search of the remnants of the Atlantic Wall. Thus, the more than 6,000 kilometers long defensive line from bunkers on the beaches of Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the British Channel Islands is called. The result is a series of photographs documenting the last traces of a cruel, megalomaniac vision eighty years after the beginning of the Second World War. Van der Voort succeeds in surprising new views of the architecture of the gray colossi: some of the bunkers are reminiscent of ancient temples with their domed roofs and entrees, others of futuristic villas, as the architecture of brutalism of the 1950s could have produced, or of abstract concrete sculptures of cats, elephants and turtles. The sea and the nature with dunes and heath landscapes are not only backdrops in the photographs, but have contributed to the decay of the bunker. Humans and animals also influence the Nazi buildings by spraying them with graffiti or using them as shelter. Van der Voort's photographic inventory is perfectly complemented by historical insertions written by Volker Jakob.