WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE ?
Cologne-Merheim, Germany, 2022 - ongoing
Where Have All the Flowers Gone? is a long-term photographic project about a site in Cologne-Merheim whose identity has undergone several radical transformations.
After the Second World War, part of the former Köln-Ostheim military airfield was taken over by the pharmaceutical company Madaus, which began operating there in 1947. The company specialised in plant-based medicines and maintained substantial areas for cultivating plants used as pharmaceutical raw materials.
Over time, the industrial function of the site disappeared. A residential neighbourhood was built on the former Madaus grounds. Today, the area consists of private homes, playgrounds, parking spaces and small gardens, while traces of its past remain embedded in the local topography: streets bear the names of medicinal plants such as Aloe, Arnica, Fennel, Hibiscus, Sage and Echinacea.
I began photographing the neighbourhood in 2022.
Rather than reconstructing its history, I am interested in the ways in which the past continues to exist within an entirely ordinary present.
Architecture, people, plants, empty spaces, windows, fences, cars and incidental details form a visual archive of a place that has repeatedly changed both its function and its identity. Traces of its previous states do not necessarily survive in preserved buildings or monuments. Sometimes they remain only in a street name, a plant growing behind a fence, or in the spatial structure of the neighbourhood itself.
The title of the project refers to the anti-war song Where Have All the Flowers Gone? I do not use the song as a direct illustration of the history of this place. Rather, I am interested in its recurring motifs of disappearance, repetition and return.
In the context of Merheim, the question acquires another layer of meaning: a site once connected to military infrastructure became a place for pharmaceutical production and the cultivation of medicinal plants, and later a space of private, everyday life. Flowers and plants appear throughout the project both literally and as traces of memory: cultivated and wild, domestic and accidental, present and absent.
Where Have All the Flowers Gone? asks what happens to the memory of a place once its original function has disappeared. What remains? What is lost? And what, decades later, returns in an entirely different form?
