Joachim Koester

Joachim Koester (*1962 Copenhagen, DK) is fascinated by history and stories, forgotten traces and the memory of places. With still and movie cameras he searches for tracks and documents them in pictures. In The Kant Walks he reconstructs the course of two paths taken by the philosopher Immanuel Kant through eighteenth-century Königsberg. In documenting these paths in photographs, Koester reveals the physical layers of history, the abandoned villages, the unspectacular neglect. What resonates throughout is the difference compared to when Kant traversed these routes. While documenting the status quo and providing a window to the past and the fiction, these images evoke the actual reality of the past, which remains a fact in the present, and question the extent to which the artistic imagination can portray the image of Kant’s meanderings.