AU CENTRE DE LA VITESSE
La Mission Photographique Transmanche

Wolfgang Zurborn

by Niko Havranek & Sebastian Gansrigler

Interview by Niko Havranek & Sebastian Gansrigler with Wolfgang Zurborn on 28 pages with 24 images from the series “Frontgarden of Illusios”, “People Pictures - Picture People”, “LUsionen”, “dressur real”, “At the Centre of Speed”, " Drift", “Catch”, “In the Middle of the West” and “Karma Driver”

At the centre of speed

by Pierre Devin

The construction of the tunnel under the channel is the symbol of European construction and its territorial development. This development favours communications networks and high-speed exchanges. Those in power decided on just-in-time distribution for the communications logistics. Speed and just-in-time, to the point of saturation, have become the very attributes of the powers-that-be.

The abolition of the natural obstacle has inevitably brought about a banalization of the voyage itself, a cosmopolitan standardisation of the places of transit and even of the destinations, articulated in a language consisting of pictograms and elementary English. Like the „Transsiberian“, the „Simplon Orient Express“, or the „Etoile du Nord“, will Eurostar engender its own prose?

Wolfgang Zurborn was intrigued by this „compression“ of significations of the contemporary world at two moments which are themselves significative. On the one hand, the inauguration, which is conceived as a concerted and decisive moment. With the projection of the images and, if possible, other poetics – for a shuttle, fundamentally, is nothing more than an international subway – and on the other hand, the city of Europe which sees itself in permanence as a panorama of the continent, and which has thus taken on the form of a megamall. Could a better symbol have been imagined?

Strange reversal. Turner, in 1844, who for the first time, in his painting „Rain, steam and speed“ addressed himself to the train, had a presentiment of the change in perception of the world due to speed. A world of fugitive impressions that would be a revelation for Monet and Pissaro.

On the contrary, Wolfgang Zurborn, working around the central theme of the High Speed Train, spots the flow, just–in–time and, in the end, stripped of meaning, of the moving images in which we live. This ironic halt is eminently political. It is no longer the consumer, nor the amateur of art, who is concerned, but the citizen. He will need silence and time to think.

Translated by Nina Bogin

Im Zentrum der Geschwindigkeit

by Denis Brudna

[…] Like digging in a historical-cultural sediment, Wolfgang Zurborn discovered with his camera all essential stratifications that describe the theme of the Eurotunnel, but it also documents the far more complicated cultural and social interconnections and contradictions … Zurborn’s pictures are indeed quite real and narrative, nevertheless, especially in the form of the picture collages, have a strong abstracting tendency. When looking at his work, it becomes obvious which position he personally refers to the idea of the tunnel. But his critical questioning of existing and newly created artificial urbanity is not lost in the mere accusation, but delivers serious conceptual approaches […]