The Blue Skies Project

Over a 5,5 year period, Anton researched and photographed a blue sky above the last known location of every former nazi Germany concentration camp and killing center across Europe. These nazi Germany concentration camps existed from 1933 to 1945 (4432 days) in a highly organised system of imprisonment, forced labor, and murder. More than half of the 1078 sites have no visual remains today.

Kusters’ central time-based installation “One Thousand and Seventy-eight Blue Skies” contains 1078 slowly fading instant film images of blue skies, in dialogue with a 4432 day long tracking sound piece by Ruben Samama. The installation is controlled by underlying data consisting of dates, gps coordinates, and number of victims.

The upwards viewpoint reflects upon the difficulty of representing and speaking of trauma, the fading of collective memory, and is a confrontation of how we witness, how we see, and how we choose to remember.

Anton will talk about the 5,5 year long process of creating this work, dealing with the difficult research of camp locations and histories, the logistical problems of finding blue skies, travelling to every single place personally, and working with inaccurate and incomplete data. He will also shed light upon his ongoing efforts to show the work in relevant places, and the collaborations across the different platforms that became part of the project.

Anton Kusters (Belgium, 1974)  focuses on the human condition, exploring interconnections between generations, history, decay and the loss of experience of place.
His works and installations often present themselves as alternate, fragmented narratives through themes such as solace, hope and doubt. He draws upon events, biographies and objects from within his own family, connecting them to larger political and social histories and present day digital data. Working across different media, his practice ranges from single autonomous pieces to large scale multi-faceted projects.
He has been exhibited at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Photographers’ Gallery, FORMAT19 and Landskrona, amongst others. His work is part of the permanent collections of V&A Museum, ICP Museum, FoMu, and Fundación Banco Sabadell. In 2019, he was nominated for the Prix Pictet, and he was a finalist in the 2020 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. His most recent book “1078 Blue Skies, 4432 Days” was published in 2021 by Kehrer Verlag.