Our residences

Johanna Altgaßen

Johanna Altgaßen studied Fine Arts at the Braunschweig University of Art (GER) and the Art Academy Malmö (SWE). Her artistic practice moves between the areas of sound art, sculpture, drawing, digital and analogue film. She is interested in site- specific working and the attempt to deconstruct various aspects of society and nature from a voyeuristic stance. Repetition recurs as method and material throughout her practice - observing where the same lingers and the differences begin to emerge in the seemingly identical.

 

During her residency at the Fondation Fiminco, she continues her exploration of the intersections between weather, birds, and commemorative culture. The starting point of her project is the war-diary entries of the artist’s great-grandfather, Rudolf Mangels (1909 in Odisheim – 1946 in Franceville), who worked as an ornithologist at the bird observatory in Rossitten. In revisiting these diaries, she seeks to analyze how seemingly apolitical records open into broader ecological and historical dialogues—investigating how the collective movement of birds and weather patterns may have shifted over the past 80 years, while also questioning where the subjective voice of the observer surfaces beneath the guise of objective data.