Building an Existence in Germany. The (Im)possibilities of Shaping a Future. Summer 2026

Once a place for beginnings, now a landscape of fading promises. In Blaubeuren, walls weather and futures quietly disappear — until the future itself becomes a memory. An artistic collaboration by Ariane Totzke & Silke Speckenmeyer.

The photographic series Building an Existence in Germany explores the contradictions of contemporary Germany, rendered visible through the small town of Blaubeuren in Baden-Württemberg. Rather than portraying the town as an isolated phenomenon, the series approaches it as a metaphor for a social condition that reaches far beyond its boundaries.

Germany in the scorching summer of 2026. A country suspended between past and future, between the self-image of a prosperous nation of culture and the visible fractures of its present. The climate crisis intensifies, while political and social conflicts increasingly shape public discourse. The rise of the AfD, right-wing populism, racism, and social exclusion raise questions about the resilience of the democratic and humanist values upon which the Federal Republic has long built its sense of identity.

The series does not seek this condition in grand events, but in its quiet traces: weathered façades, closed windows, an old mailbox, fading signs. An award for “exemplary architecture” still hangs on an ageing wall. In what appears to be an abandoned storefront, the words “Bürogemeinschaft für Existenzgründer” — “Shared Office for Start-ups” continue to promise a future.

This was a place where futures were meant to begin.

Today, the words read like an echo from another time. A faded promise of new beginnings, self-determination, and the possibility of shaping one’s own future.

It is precisely through their ordinariness that these fragments acquire a quiet melancholy. They speak of a society that once defined itself through progress, prosperity, order, and cultural achievement — and whose certainties increasingly appear fragile. External decay becomes an image of an inner condition.

And of all places, Blaubeuren: a picturesque small town renowned for the Blautopf and its almost unreal, luminous blue waters, for its historic façades, its romantic beauty, and its apparent timelessness. Yet while the water continues to flow beneath the ground, something above it seems to have come to a standstill.

Blaubeuren, it seems, has abolished itself.

Perhaps this is where the real tragedy lies: not in sudden collapse, not in spectacular catastrophe, but in a gradual disappearance. A process so slow that decay eventually ceases to appear exceptional and simply becomes part of everyday life. 

Building an Existence in Germany is a photographic inventory of this state of in-between — between memory and future, aspiration and reality, preservation and disappearance. It is an exploration of the possibilities and impossibilities of shaping a future, and of what remains of a culture when both its material and ideological foundations slowly begin to erode.