Author Description

Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann have an intuition for places in which deliberate developments become concrete.In the text and photo essay Personal Kill, they present architectures, scenarios and finds that they have recorded in recent years on military training areas of the US Army.Some overlapping sections occur between postmodern aesthetics and waging war which are dealt with in parallel in the essays by Johan Frederik Hartle.In both cases, forms of perception are practiced which deal with the invisible and the absent, with simulations, with ruins, with the idea of urbanity and ultimately with the border phenomenon of every experience: with trauma itself.The interiors of empty houses can be seen in the pictures, alternating between the aesthetics of the shell of a building and a building in ruins.In these architectural simulacra the reality of war is present in a subtle way: through labyrinth-like tunnels, through the tracks of boots in the clay and graffiti on the walls.You have to look very closely to realise that people are being trained in these rooms to overcome their inhibition of killing.The photo book Personal Kill indirectly opens up the physical reality of war (on this side of its traumatisation) to get closer to the aspects of what, to a large extent, is removed from representability.The title alludes to this: since the Vietnam War, Personal Kill in military jargon refers to killing the enemy in direct contact, so that you are absolutely sure of being responsible for the death of another real person.English and German text.