Hans Gindlesberger
Partial Architectures hybridizes processes and concepts across photography, architecture, and industry in exploring notions of historical imagination, preservation, and prosthetic memory.Partial Architectures began with a roll of film shot by my grandfather while he was stationed as an American serviceman in Germany during World War II. The film, undeveloped, returned to home with him in 1943 and then sat untouched for nearly seventy years. After he passed away in the summer of 2011, I uncovered the film and set about having it developed. Upon unspooling the roll of film, however, each frame revealed only a black fog, the evidence of its exposure to light and time.

Surviving in my grandfather's archives was a small number of photographs showing the remnants of buildings leveled by Allied bombings. Referencing these images, I began drawing a set of architectural schematics that imagined the fallen portions of the buildings my grandfather had witnessed and recorded. Binding together photographic and architectural processes, I re-inscribed my diagrams into the blank space of the found negatives through a laser etching process, and then printed those negatives as architectural blueprints, using the historical cyanotype process. The schematic drawings were subsequently rendered as computer generated, three-dimensional models and then manifested as physical objects through a rapid-prototyping process. These scale models were re-photographed and composited into images of the German landscape, taken in the summer of 2011 when I traveled to Germany to re-map my grandfather's movements through the country. In the translation from nothingness and memory to the tangibility of a physical object and back again to the ambiguity of the photograph, these partial and speculative architectures serve as uncanny monuments in dialogue with both familial loss and generational memory and the German impulse to remember its national history and trauma.

Hans Gindlesberger’s practice examines the ways we are a part of, and apart from, the places we belong. His projects span photography, video, and installation and have been exhibited widely in exhibitions, festivals, and screenings. He is the recipient of national and international awards and grants, including a 2008 Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and is a 2011 recipient of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fellowship. He earned his MFA in Photography from the State University of New York at Buffalo and currently holds the position of Assistant Professor of Digital Imaging at the Virginia Tech School of Visual Arts.

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