Taxonomy Moldova is a project of the in Berlin based artist and photographer Volker Kreidler in cooperation with the Ukrainian curator and art mediator Tanja Sokolnykova. The project consists of photographic visual research in the Republic of Moldova.

For four years Volker Kreidler has been investigating the complex and contradictory socio-political and cultural situation in the small country Republic of Moldova - the fluctuations between excessive capitalism and post-communist nostalgia, the rift between West and East, drastic unemployment and emigration, cultural diversity and its loss, privatization of public space and dissolution of cities. The contrasts between progress and standstill, willingness to act and passivity, amnesia and the search for identity as well as the historically anchored conflict between the Republic of Moldova and the territory of Transnistria, which continues to be ascribed to it under international law. The Republic of Moldova is not the vessel of a rigid history, a system of values and an identity, but the kaleidoscope of several "Moldovas", with manifold historical constructs and competing views of the world. The visual mapping explores the complexity and diversity of Moldova, a mirror image of fragile Europe. 

The project classifies the Republic of Moldova into a taxonomy. This classification method from the natural sciences is adapted as a visual-aesthetic ordering principle. The taxonomy structure of the project shows itself in the alternation of the viewing distance from the expanse/large/macro to the near/small/micro, from the abstract to the concrete, from space to the designer of space via topographies/landscapes, urban space to man and his living circumstances/everyday situations/spaces of action. The narrative thread should reflect the process of approach in which a traveller reduces the distance to the unknown and invisible. This process of rapprochement takes place in several stages/levels.

The core of the project is the staging of human a "action" in public and semi-public spaces. While the second level shows the consequences of an action/non-action as a social image, the human being is penetrated in the near perspective as a carrier of action. 

Taxonomy Moldova

2015 — 2019

Taxonomy Moldova is a project of the in Berlin based artist and photographer Volker Kreidler in cooperation with the Ukrainian curator and art mediator Tanja Sokolnykova. The project consists of photographic visual research in the Republic of Moldova.

For four years Volker Kreidler has been investigating the complex and contradictory socio-political and cultural situation in the small country Republic of Moldova - the fluctuations between excessive capitalism and post-communist nostalgia, the rift between West and East, drastic unemployment and emigration, cultural diversity and its loss, privatization of public space and dissolution of cities. The contrasts between progress and standstill, willingness to act and passivity, amnesia and the search for identity as well as the historically anchored conflict between the Republic of Moldova and the territory of Transnistria, which continues to be ascribed to it under international law. The Republic of Moldova is not the vessel of a rigid history, a system of values and an identity, but the kaleidoscope of several "Moldovas", with manifold historical constructs and competing views of the world. The visual mapping explores the complexity and diversity of Moldova, a mirror image of fragile Europe. 

The project classifies the Republic of Moldova into a taxonomy. This classification method from the natural sciences is adapted as a visual-aesthetic ordering principle. The taxonomy structure of the project shows itself in the alternation of the viewing distance from the expanse/large/macro to the near/small/micro, from the abstract to the concrete, from space to the designer of space via topographies/landscapes, urban space to man and his living circumstances/everyday situations/spaces of action. The narrative thread should reflect the process of approach in which a traveller reduces the distance to the unknown and invisible. This process of rapprochement takes place in several stages/levels.

The core of the project is the staging of human a "action" in public and semi-public spaces. While the second level shows the consequences of an action/non-action as a social image, the human being is penetrated in the near perspective as a carrier of action.