Michael Disqué, Roman Ehrlich

Die Ruinen von Exodus

Landscape as Canvas. Ruins of the Movie Industry and an Attempt to Come Face to Face with a Place.

For their third joint book project, the photographer Michael Disqué and the writer Roman Ehrlich traveled to the Tabernas desert in Andalusia, where they encountered Wild West theme parks and the ruins of old film sets that directors like Sergio Leone had erected in the Spanish hinterland for productions of their Westerns. The Tabernas desert’s own history has left few visible traces in the sand between the shrubs, making it an ideal blank canvas for the staging of other stories, historic events, fiction and fabrications.

Die Ruinen von Exodus (The Ruins of Exodus) contains photographic works by Disqué that capture visual impressions of the scenery while using techniques of collage to convey the dizzying effects of interference between the films and the actual history of the Tabernas desert. Ehrlich’s writings probe the connections between the film productions realized in the desert and the real landscape and trace the manifold projections back to the origins of their imagery.

The two artists’ most recent venture in participant observation, Die Ruinen von Exodus is also an attempt to bring out the movie industry with its addiction to glaring light on the stage of a book together with the austere landscape’s underexposed own history. Disqué and Ehrlich went out into the desert as spectators and readers and returned with a bag of rusty cans and a multitude of signifiers, images, and stories rendered in these pages.