INBETWEEN 

Ongoing Project since 2018
Republik.ch & Bajour &  Instagram

“An ‘outside’ can only exist if there is an ‘inside’, so that spaces can be separated from one another. Through a physical ‘outside’ and a society that functions as an ‘outside’, an ‘inside’ manifests itself – one that is autonomous, yet can never detach itself from its creator. I was assigned female at birth, but I identify as neither female nor male – but as ‘non-binary’.” (Sascha, 2010)

Since 2018, I have been photographing Sascha, following a path between self-perception and the gaze of society through which we are perceived and categorized. What began with conversations, explanations and a slowly growing trust has developed over the years into a long-term photographic collaboration and friendship.
As in my photobook Viel Glück zum Muttertag, for which I photographed my stepdaughter Zoe for more than ten years, I am not interested in depicting a phenomenon or following a fixed concept. Rather, I am interested in observing and documenting the subtle developments – what shifts, what remains, and what cannot be anticipated.
Sascha writes short stories and poems about personal experiences and the tension between inner identity and external perception. They explore the body, language, desire and the normative categories through which we perceive ourselves and others. These thoughts and conversations directly inform my photographic work with Sascha.
I understand non-binarity as a questioning of the binary order itself. What happens when gender does not have to be unambiguous or fixed, when the inner self does not necessarily correspond to the exterior, and when ambiguity is allowed to remain?
Sascha plays with identity and attribution, with symbolism and provocation, while questioning traditional gender roles. The photographs move between intimacy and distance, self-staging and observation, between the desire to be seen and the desire to resist being defined by a fixed identity.
Perhaps our own reality begins where something can no longer be clearly named. Like the Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker.