Helge Tscharn already did it back in the days and
put skateboarding on the walls of the city with a projector. When there
was the lockdown phase in Germany it was the perfect time to do this
project once again. You can also find it in our latest issue (and you can find another interesting project of his here).
During the pandemic lockdown, popular squares, parks, and people’s local neighborhoods lost their geographic and social importance. Urban life and urban space came to a halt or even got a new, negative connotation as a forbidden, lifeless setting. Sites became abandoned, including secluded parking garages, parks on the edges of town, and empty park benches. These also happen to be the kind of “non-spaces” that skateboarders have always appropriated for their practice, thereby adding layers of identity, relation, and history. In his installation Silent Spaces –The Skateboarder is Absent / The Skateboarder is Present, photographer Helge Tscharn wanted to bring skateboarders back into the newly abandoned cities – but in a distanced way, as a projected image, just as removed and absent as the rest of urban life. And for a brief moment, they inject a sense of life and motion into the new stillness.