Artists Statement

Vanessa Gravenor

scholar visual arts  1.10. – 31.12.2025

Portrait 2025, Photo by Amin Darbandi

What made you apply for the otte1 scholarship?

I came across the program and found it fitting to my multi-year project Masking Fears at the Periphery, which I began in 2023. It is an artistic research project that examines how fears get manifested in warning tests, advertisements, drills, and rituals from the Cold War to the present. I started the project with a short-found footage and animation video I made called Cover, Duck & (2023) and then continued with Free Recall (2024). In the latter work, I filmed on the Baltic Sea on the West Coast of Latvia and began a longer dialogue on landscapes as repositories of memories. I took the residency as a chance to further explore a different part of the same sea and how threat writes on waters, as Ulrike Gerhard so nicely put it, as material memories.

What did you work on during your stay?

I worked on a new filmic research project where I filmed on the beach in Eckernförde. I directed my camera to the military base, to the left of the beach, and the Torpedo Test Site, to the right. I also spent quite some time working and reading in the Heimatgemeinschaft Eckernförde where I learned about the presence of forced laborers who were encamped during WWII in the region. Furthering this, I conducted interviews with professionals and individuals in Kiel, Eckernförde, and Gettorf who have worked in or whose lives were impacted by these marine facilities. In addition to this, I created a new series of aluminum and photographic prints titled Fear is a Light Spectrum (2025) which I exhibited during my solo presentation: an exhibition, film screening and moderated talk with visual culture studies scholar and art educator Ulrike Gerhard. The prints are evolving photographic collages based upon gathered archival materials I have collected through different research trips in the past. During the residency, I got the first chance to materialize these collages into a final work.

What inspired you at the Künstlerhaus in Eckernförde?

The friendliness, generosity, and openness of the people, specifically the members and board members of the Kunstlerhaus. The melancholic beauty of the landscape offered both refuge and repose to mediate intensively on difficult topics.

What do you take away from Eckernförde for your further artistic development?

I am continuing both projects and plan future filming in Spring 2026. I also plan new photographic prints of Fear is a Light Spectrum that I am currently cleaning and printing.

What would you like to add?

I am very grateful for my time in residency and specifically the opportunity to present works in the form of exhibitions and discussive events. These events and exchanges with the public were specifically meaningful in this stage in my artistic development and the space challenged me to take risks with new materials e.g. with aluminum and acrylic fluorescent glass which I wouldn’t have otherwise done alone in my studio in Berlin. As the local and national landscape for culture is becoming increasingly more precarious in Germany and beyond, institutions like Otte 1 make culture possible.