1078 Blue Skies / 4432 Days

Consisting of 1078 Polaroid photos of abstract blue skies above Nazi concentration camps, the work is an unsettling way of looking directly at an unspeakable trauma that is also a fading collective memory.

Over a six--year period, Anton Kusters researched and photographed a blue sky at the last known location of every former Nazi Germany SS concentration camp and killing center across Europe. These camps existed for 4432 days, from 1933 to 1945, in a highly organized sys-tem of imprisonment, forced labor, and mur-der. More than half of these 1078 sites (concentration camps) have no visual remains today. Every photograph is manually blind-stamped with the number of victims beneath that sky, as well as its gps coordinates.
For The Blue Skies Project Belgian artist Anton Kusters (b. 1974) was nominated for the Prix Pictet 2019, and was a finalist for the 2020 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. The Blue Skies Project is curated by Monica Allende, and the exhibition installa-tion is accompanied by a 13 year long tracking audio/visual piece by sound artist and com-poser Ruben Samama.

Anton Kusters explores the difficulties of representing trauma, loss of the experience of place, and the act of commemoration. Using an increasingly abstracted and deconstructed representation, he pushes for an ongoing influence of the medium on the work itself. His focus lies on investigating ways of seeing, the mechanisms of memory and remembrance, and the significance of viewer placement and subject-position.
Anton was born in Belgium (1974), and obtained a master’s degree in Political Science at K.U.Leuven (Belgium). He studied photography at STUK Leuven (Belgium) and Academy of Fine Arts, Hasselt (Belgium). He lives & works in Belgium and Tokyo.

He has photographed, published and exhibited the Yakuza (2011) and Mono No Aware (2014) works. In 2017 he completed the online epistolary #image_by_image, an experimental public dialogue based on associations of image and word. From 2012 to 2017 he created The Blue Skies Project across different media and platforms, curated by longstanding collaborator Monica Allende (UK). In 2021 he completed the installations Two Hundred and Sixty-nine Steps, Looking up (2017) and There is Nothing Here (2021). He is currently working on several new works and collaborations: the ongoing Zero series, Caduta Massi, La C.H., and On Your Shoulders.