There are poets one reads, and there are poets who remain with you for years. Georg Trakl unquestionably belongs to the latter for me. His texts were never merely literature in the conventional sense, never just words on paper. What has always fascinated me is his emotional world: that profound melancholy, that quiet sense of abandonment, that almost painful beauty emerging from darkness, silence, and inner coldness. Especially during difficult periods in my own life, his poems were never simply reading material; they became a space of resonance. Some texts accompanied me through phases in which other words would have remained empty. Perhaps that is precisely why this cycle became so important to me. It did not arise from a purely artistic concept, but from a long and deeply personal relationship with a poet and the emotional landscape his work opens up.
To understand this fascination, one must briefly look at Trakl’s life. Born in Salzburg in 1887, he is now regarded as one of the most significant voices of Austrian Expressionism. His body of work is relatively small, yet it possesses an extraordinary density. His poems revolve around night, autumn, decay, guilt, solitude, family, death, and that elusive atmosphere that resists any simple explanation. His life was marked by inner crises, intensified by substance abuse and a growing psychological instability. Particularly traumatic was his service as a medical officer during the First World War after the Battle of Grodek, where he was confronted with unimaginable suffering. In 1914, he died in a military hospital in Kraków from a cocaine overdose; whether this was a conscious act of suicide or a collapse during a severe mental crisis remains historically unresolved. This tragic dimension helps illuminate parts of his work, though it should never be reduced to biography alone.
What has always drawn me most strongly to Trakl is that his texts do not tell stories in the conventional sense. They create states of being. They are inner spaces, atmospheres, emotional landscapes. Perhaps that is precisely why they translated so naturally into my photographic language. I was never interested in merely illustrating a poem. That would have been far too simple. I did not want to create visual accompaniments to literature. What interested me was something else entirely: how the same emotional world might be translated into photographic form. How does one photograph silence? How does one photograph solitude? How does one photograph that peculiar coldness that runs through Trakl’s work, yet is never merely meteorological?
From these questions, the concept of the cycle emerged. The script itself became part of the image — not as decoration, but as an essential bearer of meaning. The handwritten Kurrent script placed upon the body is a central element of the series. On one level, it points toward historical depth, toward writing as cultural memory. On another, it speaks to the physicality of language itself. The words do not sit beside the image; they inscribe themselves into it. Skin becomes parchment, and the body becomes the bearer of memory, pain, solitude, and poetic condensation. This is where, for me, the strength of these works lies: language and body are not separate. They merge into a single visual statement.
The choice of Kurrent script is far from incidental. For readers unfamiliar with the term, Kurrent is a historical form of German cursive handwriting that was widely used in the German-speaking world from the early modern period well into the 19th and early 20th century. It is characterized by its flowing, angular lines and by a visual elegance that differs markedly from contemporary handwriting. Historically, it belongs to a long tradition of written culture, carrying with it associations of letters, diaries, official documents, and private thoughts preserved in ink. Precisely because of this historical weight, it felt deeply appropriate for this cycle. Trakl’s world is not modern in the contemporary sense; it is steeped in memory, melancholy, and temporal distance. Kurrent visually reinforces this atmosphere. It does not merely write words onto the body — it inscribes history, memory, and a sense of vanished time into the image itself. At the same time, its flowing rhythm lends the script a bodily quality, almost as if thought itself had taken visible form upon the skin.
Anyone who looks at the works in the series Corpus Scriptum will immediately recognize this connection. The flowing Kurrent script across the face, neck, and body creates an almost intimate proximity between poem and flesh. The writing does not feel imposed from outside; rather, it appears like an inner thought that has surfaced. Through black and white, and through the darkness of the pictorial space, the same atmosphere emerges that has defined Trakl’s poetry for me over many years: silence, shadow, and an almost tentative search for what can only ever be suggested.
Perhaps that is precisely why this cycle is so personal to me. His depressive, quiet, and profoundly solitary texts accompanied me through difficult periods of my own life. Not because they offered comfort in any conventional sense, but because they articulated something that often remains wordless. Perhaps this cycle had to come into being for that very reason — not merely as an homage to a poet, but as the processing of an inner world that has been familiar to me for many years.
Following this cycle, another literary dialogue is already planned with Max Herrmann-Neiße, which is likely to be realized next month. Photographically, it will be interpreted in an entirely different way, yet one connection will remain: language will once again appear through Kurrent script on the body. Word and skin, script and shadow, body and poem remain the connecting thread. After that, this literary path will, for the time being, come to a close before I once again turn toward other themes and visual worlds.
Perhaps that is precisely what is beautiful about such cycles. They do not need to continue endlessly. Some themes accompany us for years, demand images, and eventually find their provisional conclusion. Not because they are definitively finished, but because, for the moment, they have been spoken. After that, something new may begin.