Astrid Busch

Watching Tanker, 2022, 26:49 min

The port city of Le Havre in the north of France is particularly marked by the destruction of the Second World War. During numerous stays, I have been interested not only in the post-war architecture of the architect Auguste Perret, but also in the port and the container ships arriving at high frequency, which supply this city not only with goods, but also with hope, dreams and longing. Therefore, I decided to take the sea route there myself and enter this port on a container ship.
The seas have always linked the world, because ships use them to bring goods and people to the most remote places. Thus, they have multiple functions as a transportation and communication space, as well as a place of longing and memory.
There is hardly any other place than a ship where superstition, sailor’s yarn and romance collide so harshly with real everyday life. Surrounded by the sea, one quickly loses one’s sense of time, proportions, speed and distances. The transition from reality to fiction within the world at sea is fluid. Not only metaphorically is the ship, which forms a self-contained space at sea, connected to all ports and times via the narratives and the cargo.