During my work with the organisation ‘American Indian Changing Spirits’, I was repeatedly confronted with places where massacres of the indigenous population of California took place in the 19th century. After visiting some of these places and trying to photograph them, a friend recommended the book ‘An American Genocide’ by historian Benjamin Madley, in which he describes the events in California between 1846 and 1873. The appendix lists more than 300 places where 5 or more indigenous people were murdered. To get an overview and a better geographical impression, I opened my browser and searched for the nearest points documented by the ubiquitous Google vehicles. Most of them were in the immediate or relative vicinity of the places described. In most cases, there was nothing to remind me of the tragedies that had occurred there. I compared the screenshots with the photos I had taken in these places and asked myself what I was actually seeing or had expected to see.
At the same time, I was reminded of Villem Flusser’s descriptions of images as a screen that comes between us and the world.But in front of and behind this semi-transparent surface were the shadows of time and culture, which made perception even more impossible.In this sense, the digital artefacts and imperfections that appeared in the gaze of the automated camera were a reminder of the difference between map and territory, between image and reality.This compilation shows 336 of these places as well as locations from German ‘Indian films’, which showed an American foreignness that had little to do with geographical reality and yet created a collective image of America.