SCREAMING SILENCE I

Shellfire, bombardments, explosions – you can see and hear them in the news on an almost daily basis. But
these reports are not able to profoundly touch us; the events seem too distant, too chaotic, too intangible.
What war inflicts on us is revealed to its full extent only in retrospect: the injuries, the scars, the
debris. And those who have been killed – who are now missing. Districts, settlements, entire regions lie in
ruins – and have literally died out.

And yet, despite of all of this destruction, Alexander Maria Lohmann has discovered a glimmer of hope: untamed
greenery is overgrowing the ruins. People emerge from nowhere, go about their work and begin to rebuild their
homes. Life goes on. And in the middle of all of this, everywhere, there are children. They carry the hope of
a peaceful future within them. Above all, however, they are full of dreams and fantasies and the only thing
they long for is to play.

Screeching children, howling sirens, flickering lights – Disneyland, too, is sometimes reminiscent of a battleground.
Even if the omens have been reversed: The „field of rubble“ in the kids paradise is quickly cleaned up and everyone involved can go home unharmed in the evening. Yet these images too, quietly and abandoned, reverberate
the preceding events. Upon viewing them, wild cries of joy and powerful emotions come to life again and escalate into cacophony.

Side by side with scenes of real war zones and similar motifs taken from the same angle, the deep contrast of the situations – despite superficial parallels – becomes abundantly clear. But instead of relativism setting in,
these fundamentally different subject matters reinforce each other. Too much, too loud, too vehemently: the absurdity
of what people do to each other screams out of the photographs in both these scenarios.