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Derive

2014, Norway
48 postcards - 6 leporellos

Usually, picture postcards depict characteristics and highlights of tourist destinations, conveying scenic views, architectural features, variations on fairly similar themes. These six postcards however appear to have a differing, yet common topic: Infrastructure.

Dating back to the sixties and seventies, they show aerial views of housing, road and retail developments against the backdrop of mountains and the sea. They show ferries linking mainland and islands. And they reveal replicas of historic photographs from the interior and working environment of the textile factory in Salhus.

Dissected, reassembled, drawn onto and multiplied, they become caleidoscopic, fragmented images between progress and regress. The collages turn the original images into an at times unrecognizable pattern. On some postcards, the ferry has disappeared completely or appears like a fata morgana in repeated numbers.

What originally seemed like a postcard series documenting the status and maybe even pride in latest engineering and structural ablilities, brand new and still unfinished urban development, becomes now mixed with nostalgia. The settings have changed beyond recognition: Ferries are replaced by bridges, roads and houses have mulitplied into a suburban sprawl, the factory is a museum.

It is in fact the place where I found piles of these cards: 'Just take them, nobody else wants them anyway.'