Oliver Moritz Federico Basch

I am interested in found objects that can explain a space and act as representations of a particular human behaviour pattern.

Looking for traces and leftovers of human existence, I give importance to things that are sometimes easily overlooked and fleeting.

Acting as a photographic archaeologist with the aim to understand and explain human (sub-) cultures, I recover, document, analyse and interpret material remains, objects people make or discard.
As my work is primarily about objects, their materiality and their formations, the absence of people is very important to me. I am not commenting on the individuals themselves but rather on their interference and interaction with the environment, as well as the personalization of their surroundings.
I am trying to depict a collective behaviour. Therefore, the spaces just became a stage, a platform for the objects to act as protagonists.

This particular series is about human behaviour in specific, detached places: allotments in London. Makeshift handiworks that I found there serve as a representation of a common act:
To protect themselves and their lots from the influences of nature (climate, animals etc.), people tend to improvise and recycle everyday items and discarded materials. They give ordinary materials a new purpose and create devices diverted from their originally intended use. Some of those constructs seem to defeat any purpose and give a rather awkward impression.
Others are very creative and eccentric in their appearance.

These sculptural objects and their existence in this pseudo natural environment lend the places an almost post-apocalyptic appearance, a desolate impression that is intensified by them being abandoned most of the time during winter. Time seems to come to a standstill and the found objects act as relics of a seemingly long lost civilisation, witnesses of a failed attempt to fight extinction.