Forever…Forever

Over the course of twenty-two months, Johann Lurf fixed the gaze of a specially developed 65mm camera on a single fragment of the world: the Ottenstein Reservoir. What begins as a quiet observation of nature gradually transforms into a monumental image of cosmic motion. At first, the lake appears familiar – a place suspended between sky and water. But as the exposures grow longer, the dimensions themselves shift: stars begin to draw delicate lines, the sun inscribes bright arcs, the moon traces soft, almost calligraphic diagonals. The water surface becomes a perfect mirror that folds sky and landscape symmetrically into one another – above and below, light and shadow, becoming and fading.

As in ★, Johann Lurf explores the relationship between vision and cosmos, but here no archive emerges; instead, a sequence of images forms that becomes an astronomical figure in its own right. The reservoir turns into a planetary clock whose hands are made of light – a calm, precise choreography that evokes utopian architectures such as Tatlin’s Tower, without ever citing them directly.

The visual structure is accompanied by a sound composition by Jung An Tagen, built on the rhythms of day and night cycles, weather phenomena, and the movements of celestial bodies. This constellation of image and sound opens a resonance space that extends far beyond the visible. It recalls Laurie Spiegel’s "Kepler’s Harmony of the Worlds", an electronic interpretation of Kepler’s cosmic harmony, included on the Voyager Golden Record – and long since beyond our solar system.

Finally, the panorama freezes into diagonal bands of pure light: traces written by sun and moon over many months. A film that does not narrate, but reveals how time and sky intertwine – a harmony of the world that ultimately unfolds with unexpected force. (Martin Reinhart)