Born From the Limb by Maximilian Thuemler

Issue 152

Maximilian Thuemler's ongoing project Born From the Limb is invested in the correlation of labor, land, and migration. Focusing on the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia, the work touches ground at a vaguely defined point of black origin in the United States. Utilizing a combination of self-portraiture, still life, and landscape imagery, the pictures filter popular culture, folklore, myth, and art history in search of fragments related to the historic and contemporary narratives surrounding our understanding of blackness within the context of Americana. By referencing and reproducing found images of regional romanticism and combining them with photographic traces of a scarred landscape, the work seeks to highlight the discrepancy of local legacies. The accumulation and arrangement of found images sets the landscape of memory inherent to this narrative and establishes the space through which Thuemler and his audience move. Hereby the performative self-portraits reinvigorate a silent expanse of land with gestures derived from history's Eurocentric relationship to blackness. Thuemler's body is employed as a medium to the point of exhaustion, addressing the emblematic social and political concerns of a forgotten terrain, while considering the complexities of America's relationship to its collective past. As the project's sequence of images continues to develop, it begins to function as a case study of the African American genesis in South Carolina and Georgia that explores the possibilities of reading and evaluating broad image landscapes allowing for a critical assessment of official histories, archival narratives, and vernacular traditions.

Maximilian Thuemler (he/him) was born in Berlin, Germany and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
www.maximilianthuemler.com | @maximilianthuemler