David Favrod / Julia Katharina Thiemann C/O Berlin Talents 35: Hikari

In the last seven months of the Second World War, half of the city Kobe was destroyed. Incendiary and cluster bombs wreaked untold damage and claimed thousands of civilian lives. Food, water, and energy supplies dwindled and social life collapsed. After the war, and for the decades that followed, there was collective silence: the past was buried, the suffering repressed, and discussion closed off entirely. But couldn’t the memories of individual and collective catastrophe be preserved instead? How could experiences that have been passed on through oral traditions be kept as part of cultural memory? And can one borrow the memories of others to define and solidify one’s own identity?

In the cycle of photographs Hikari, photographer David Favrod retraces the experiences of his grandparents in Kobe. He explores and processes his family’s history, which he knows only from the stories that unconsciously shaped him as he was growing up. In his photographs, Favrod recreates memories of events that he never experienced, and in this act of artistic appropriation, he tests the fine line between fiction and reality.