Atlantis

Atlantis is not a city that can be found anywhere on the map. It is nonetheless everywhere. Atlantis is a feeling, a fictitious place. Over the course of the last few centuries, almost every country has claimed Atlantis as part of its domain. Writers have written about it, films have been made, and music has been composed about it. Everyone knows the myth of the sunken city. Plato described Atlantis as a powerful island city with valuable resources and fertile soil. The exact information handed down about Atlantis was not so important to my project. Only a handful of people can recount the legend of Atlantis in detail, but everyone can relate to it. For most people it brings to mind something innocent, an ideal society that met its end unexpectedly. I was interested in the associations people have with the word: Atlantis is like a symbol for the eternal search for happiness, but the realization of happiness always entails a sense of its finite nature.

A fragmented view of Atlantis is present everywhere. I wanted to assemble these fragments in a new way; I had a vague feeling, but no concrete idea. So I set out looking for Atlantis and sought out places that bear the name. There are many companies or places that have named themselves after Atlantis, often in conjunction with water: wharves, marinas, diving schools, and swimming pools, for example. There are also clubs, hotels, jewelers, sponge manufacturers, fitness studios, and cinemas, as well as publishers, discos, secondhand stores, vacation parks, ice cream parlors, labyrinths, and transport companies. The glitz of places like the gigantic Hotel Atlantis in Dubai did not interest me. I visited locations where I had the sense they were playing with something that is actually too big for them: the dream of paradise. Like trying on an oversized dress. I searched for images of this yearning, for morbid places that already showed signs of decay. I was in the scruffy New York secondhand store Atlantis, in the “Hispanic Gay Club” Atlantis in Queens, in the Atlantis hostel on the main street of Krakow, and in Atlantis, the Belgian apartment park with futuristic architecture. I saw how these places infused the myth with life and lent it their own images, with symbols like superman, cowboys, and palms. Everywhere I went people were very open toward me because no one objects to being associated with Atlantis. Only a handful of people link Atlantis with imminent downfall. During my journeys, I sometimes felt like a time traveler, like someone who is visiting those who are unaware and who knows how the story plays out. Beyond the name and location there was also an inner coherency that remained intact from place to place. When I now look at the photographs, it is completely unimportant where they were taken. The overall picture they present is not one of an ideal city. Not a paradise, not a state of absolute bliss. The Atlantis that I discovered has something that is hard to grasp. Something fated, turned in upon itself, removed. It is a lost city, and that is why it can hold so many dreams. Atlantis is a place of longing, which everyone fills with individual visions and ideas. This is my version.