In photography, Roland Barthes writes, “it cannot be denied that the thing existed”. In Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald has his protagonist report that something dissolves exactly where he “makes the effort to remember" - “the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on”.

The logs of recording and deletion of “series invisible” testify with very little data – location, recording, deletion, duration – that something happened. They are sounds that were recorded and deleted, not images. And yet does the invisible in the series title come full circle toward photography? Concretely, the notes remind us of locations, persons, events, not least of the self-emptying of the world, of life annihilated, oblivion, which, partially and paradigmatically, is snatched from itself, of the process of recording and deleting, of memory itself.

Georg Imdahl

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