Unknown Music
The suburb of Lamboy is home to a Sinti-Clan living under poor conditions
By Pamela Dörhöfer
"An extremely gifted family of musicians' lives at the border of our city, hardly anybody noticing", says Annette Schulmerich from the Hanau Culture Society. The clan, she is enthusiastic about, is about 40 people strong, from child to grandmother. They live in mobile homes, RVs and a small stone house in the north of Lamboy. The Bambergers are Sinti. In 1961 they came to Hanau from France, where the city provided them with the area as "Interim-Quarters"
Only a single water source
Since then, the family lives in poor, semi-legal conditions – tolerated, but not more. Four to five people share one RV, barely larger than a single room. There is only one spot outside for tap water; it needs to be carried to the mobile homes by bucket. Two showers, two toilets, and two washbowls have to suffice 40 people. During rain they wade thru mud, since there is no pavement, the 44-year old Vano Bamberger comments. He is born in Hanau and as guitarist has performed on many stages.
Both, the living circumstances of the Bamberger Clan and their music, the Hanau Culture Society will feature during an event at the Comedienhaus Wilhelmsbad on Friday, September 25th. The focal point will be a concert by Vano Bamberger and his band. Vano Bamberger himself will play his precious old guitar, which he inherited from his grandfather Joe Weiss. The latter once performed together with the legendary Django Reinhardt at the "Hot Club de France" in Paris and taught the instrument to his grandson early on. Besides Vano Bamberger his brother Terrangi (rhythm-guitar), his son Donani (solo-guitar), the Jazz-Clarinetist Jeff Senfluk and the known string bass Lindy "Lady Bass" Huppertsberg will play. Their music is down-to-the-earth Sinti-Jazz, ballads and allegros, souped-up by improvisations partly based on melodies by Django Reinhardt, partly on Vano Bamberger's own compositions. The whole is decorated by elements of swing featured especially by "Lady Bass" Huppertsberg.
Photographs by Maria Dorn
The concert, however, is only one part of the evening: in the foyer of the Comedienhaus, Maria Dorn, assistant president of the Hanau Culture Society, presents black and white photographs, which she took at the Bamberger's housing area. These are atmospheric, insistent pictures, artistically ambitious, vividly illustrating the living situation of the Bamberger Clan. The workings radiate warmth, intimacy and sadness simultaneously, avoiding any voyeuristic touch whatsoever. Maria Dorn describes how she was excited about getting to know this different culture. That the Bamberger's gave her the chance to do so is not obvious: though at least part of the clan loves to be on stage – privately the Hanau Sintis are rather shy.
Frankfurter Rundschau, September 19, 2009
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Rating: Absolutely Worth Seeing
Out of the hip: Maria Dorn shoots from the horse and out of the car – exhibition at the Remisen-Gallery
By Maryanto Fischer
The garden table almost fits to one of those enchanting breakfast still lives you see in commercials: steaming coffee, croissants gleaming golden in the morning sun next to shiny red jelly. Maria Dorn remains completely untouched."In the fewest cases I arrange things", she says while opening a portfolio marked with large letters "Look, twice!" Under this title, the Grossauheim amateur photographer will have an exhibition coming up in the Remisen-Gallery at Schloss Philippsruhe. Rating: absolutely worth seeing.
Maria Dorn never leaves without at least one camera. If not, she –sometimes in the past – had to regret the absence of her working tool very bitterly. "My photography is mainly lomographical", explains the educated dental hygienist, "the images develop from the hip – from a bike, out of an airplane or from the back of a horse". Over the years she acquired a radar view for motives and parts of reality worth exploring. "When I am on the way nowadays I realize things even in familiar places I never used to notice in the past." The interest in photography Maria Dorn, born 1959 in the contemplative town of Ingelheim at the Rhine-River, inherited from her father. Since she started to deal seriously with this media in 1990, she has filled countless data storage devices with image files. Alone about 6000 are instantly viewable on her computer screen. All are connected by an intelligent view of the world. "Often I am just lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time", Dorn says decently. Since she hits the release most often spontaneously, sometimes technical deficiencies are unavoidable.
Image tension is the primary goal
"Modern photo technology is a blessing, which I exploit", Dorn says. She deeply admires those, who in the early days of photography had to deal with the simplest tools or today still and deliberately work traditionally. For her, image tension is the primary goal. "I don't care for post card prettiness, rather for pictures using their drama to induce meditation, a smile or even action".
The exhibition "Look, twice!" consists of pairs of pictures. In composing the exhibition Maria Dorn acted as a pretty astute curator of her on workings. Especially in the pairing, her anyhow profound or ironic-buoyant pictures gain additional expressiveness, which so often hovers over different levels of meaning. Commonness or contrast of the images can be by motive or of coloristic or compositional nature.
Never seeking motives
In combining impressions of poor and rich, of original and transformation or faces of happiness, Dorn not only opens image worlds but also multilayered interpretation levels. Sometimes by the coupling combination alone she strikes a sociocritical note, sometimes she is only out to convey esthetical values. "The connection between single photos sometimes strikes me by chance", so Dorn, "the pairs of pictures I show often are taken at completely different times and most different locations."
Maria Dorn never goes motive hunting. The motives find her. Staying in New York for several years fired her interest in photography. Already in 1996 she won sixth place in the nation-wide photo contest "Aperture 96". Not until the period between 1999 and 2005, the time she spent not far from "Big Apple", her personal breakthrough occurred: she participated in three group exhibitions with a New York artist guild. In 2005 professional jurors enabled her to attend two larger presentations. Finally she was hired as official photographer for an UN charity event.
"About New York City I loved the sounds, the lights, the urban canyons and the city's people in all their contrasts, and I absorbed every bit of it", Maria Dorn remembers. She became less and less fond of just "nice" pictures. "Art should have an individual charisma", the autodidact says, "it should stimulate". By the way, her photographs never emerged out of artistic ambition. "Am I an artist, because I see something?" Dorn asks provocatively. She is anxious about her first single exhibition.
Dorn's photographs claim, and that's the creator's intention, to be rather a media of communication than a subject-matter description. At the exhibition in the Remisen-Gallery she hopes for good discussions with her audience – for instance about her "Heart Moving/Memo-rial" showing a soccer fan running deep in the Holocaust-Memorial in Berlin head-to-tail covered with the Black-Red-Gold colors of Germany. Her photo-couples intensify each other or develop the partner's image theme further. The results are always surprising.
On Maria Dorn's breakfast table there are neither rapid-paced change of perspective nor motive doublings to be discovered. "You have to hurry up to see something, because everything vanishes" Paul Cezanne wrote. Not in this case: Dorn's photos clog your appetite. It's hard to talk with a mouth full.
Hanauer Anzeiger, September 14, 2007
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Analogy and tiny details in paired comparisons
Photo exhibition "Look, twice!" of Maria Dorn at the Remisen-Gallery offers bitter-sweet irony and admonishing sociocriticism.
The insisting request "Look, twice!" of the exhibition's title, the audience took it to heart. Because only by a thorough study of the small-formatted photos one discovered important details. Always pair-wise two pictures belonged together and the detection of the corresponding, sometimes contrary comparison portions disclosed eye-tweaking humor, bitter-sweet irony or provokingly admonishing sociocriticism. Maria Dorn's exhibition at the Remisen-Gallery in Schloss Philippsruhe will continue until October 21.
The connections between the pictures unfolded especially thru their titles, thereby interpreting each other. "Increasing", air plane traffic and "Decreasing", glacier tables in Canada; "Child's Play", Hanau boys and girls on a playground and "Child's Play?", a shepherd boy with his sheep in a desert in Syria; "Market Economy I", shop-till-you-drop tourists in NYC and "Market Economy II", veiled Syrian girls trying to sell woven fabrics in front of a sparse landscape, motivated to think about global order and the merciless capital markets or the advancing environmental pollution and the threatening global warming.
The single-sided view of issues was constantly put into extremely intelligent perspective. "You too can move the world", the Che Guevara air brush encourages on a Grossauheim truck, "…can you?" the partner asks, a run-down car wreck in an Indian Reservation near a canyon in Arizona. The dream of a better world anyone of the children of the western prosperity can dream next to the broken dreams of the almost exterminated Native Americans born already on the loser's side of the world reveal a multilayered breadth of vision onto the world, far off from stereotypical clichés or prefabricated positions
But also banal, amusing analogies found entrance into the exhibition. So the photo of the bottoms of an antique statue was hanging next to the gorgeous, hot-pants-covered buttocks of an Italian transvestite, the wrinkled, wise face of an age-old Ecuadorian woman next to a flashy rouged, disguised American Halloween-Beauty and close-ups of colored crayons next to cut-down tree trunks. A little girl thrown into the air by bungee ropes on a wine festival and an aged woman in a wheel chair had age as the common ground, while somewhere else quivering cold winter was placed next to hot summer or simply color or patterning of orange power sockets are compared to "The Gates" in Central Park.
The snap-shots were altogether non-arranged situational impressions and emerged independently during Maria Dorn's different journeys around the globe. The idea of pairing of two photographs across continents, borders and cultures, detached in time and location, crossed the photographer's mind only in retrospect. The commonality and the contrasts which associated people or situations in the paired pictures, the mutual interpretation of the coupled images, and the opportunity for critical discourse, forced by combination and title, catapulted this exhibition into the spheres of a comparative sociocritical study. Rightly so, one can say that Maria Dorn's photo exhibition opened by Joerg Eyfferrth from the Hanau Culture Society as well as by Andreas Saffranmueller and Harry Schneider-Reckels was the most intelligent, smart and double-edged event the Remisen-Gallery has seen in a long time.
Hanauer Anzeiger, October 6, 2007