Between the layers. Viola Maiwald documents natural gas production in Lower Saxony in her bachelor thesis.
Photo: Viola Maiwald
Photo: Viola Maiwald
Photo by Viola Maiwald
In her bachelor thesis “Between the Layers” Viola Maiwald deals with natural gas production in Lower Saxony, the federal state with the most raw gas deposits in Germany. In the process, Viola Maiwald not only photographs the natural gas production sites, but also buries film footage next to the facilities to create a direct image of the sites. These “images” refer to soil and sediment investigations carried out between 2015 and 2017 at 211 of 455 natural gas production sites in Lower Saxony, which revealed contamination by components of natural gas production. By juxtaposing the different levels of the image, she invites viewers to consider the complex interplay between beauty and destruction, dependence and autonomy, and asks us to reflect on what is often hidden.
Viola Maiwald (1988) first trained as a health and pediatric nurse before she began studying “photojournalism and documentary photography” in Hannover in 2015. She spent her semester abroad in Sarker Protick’s class at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is a founding member of the Fotograf:innen community “What’s left of Photography” and lives and works as a freelance photographer in Hanover and Hamburg.
