Urban Echoes – Walking on Color

Urban Echoes – Walking on Color is a long-term photographic project, a collection of traces from over 300 cities in over 60 countries (to the archive of traces), which explores the aesthetics of ephemerality, the universal visual language and interconnection of urban cultures and living spaces, and the quiet poetry of human traces.

For over two decades, I have been documenting colorful markings, repairs, overpaintings and other enigmatic relics on streets and squares around the world during my travels. The resulting asphalt traces, ‘condensates of lived life’, are abstract snapshots – each image is a visual echo of human existence, a fragment of lived reality and cultural diversity.
My wall installation invites contemplative viewing and allows narratives to emerge in the eyes of the viewer. The work thus becomes a projection surface for individual memories and collective experiences – images of places, people, stories.

Through my “traces,” I cast a view on the overlooked, the ephemeral, and yet the universal—upon traces that tell stories, reflect identity, and reveal global connections.
Each of the 49.5 x 49.5 cm traces is a fragment of lived reality and cultural diversity. They are relics of human presence, condensed into a polyphonic narrative about identity, change, and collective memory.
At the same time, my large archive of traces exists within a social and political context: parts of the series were part of the international art and peace project “50 Cities – 50 Traces,” organized by Mayors for Peace. The traces traveled around the world for three years—as visual ambassadors for peace, diversity, and connection.
My works are realized as pigment prints on brushed AluDibond in an edition of 5, professionally framed on the reverse with a recessed, circumferential U-profile.
All traces are entirely authentic. They have not been manipulated in terms of color or in any other way. The special printing technique allows the traces to interact with light in a manner similar to asphalt in the sun.
The modular hanging allows for flexible adaptation to any spatial conditions. In the overall installation, the individual pieces come together to form large-format, medium-sized, and small, color-intensive wall murals.

"Écriture automatique"

with fragments of reality

On her wanderings through cities all over the world, Klaudia Dietewich extracts fragments from scarred, spilled, cracked and battered asphalt surfaces: enigmatic traces, relics that in one way or another reflect the state of our world. Her found objects from the series "Wegstücke" are fragments that, although completely non-representational, become projection surfaces of the imagination, evoke memories, awaken associations and tell stories. As a "condensate of lived life", they pose the question of what remains of us and of the world as we know it.

In the photographic print, the surface structure of the real original unfolds its specific aesthetic appeal on the alu-dibond image carrier. As if photography had found its object here, to capture life that has disappeared and is disappearing, Klaudia Dietewich, with her feeling for form and structure, creates an image archive that rediscovers a supposedly well-known urban space - in images that are at once familiar, irritating and alienating.  

For Klaudia Dietewich, the city is not the uncoordinated hustle and bustle of the masses or the sea of houses in which the individual loses himself, but an almost abstract structure in which man has left his enigmatic repetitive traces. This is the place where, for the artist, the great, pure beauty of the modern world can be found. What a bewildering poetry of stains, scratches, cracks and smears!

Photography proves to be the pictorial medium that places the photographer's gaze as the actual creative agent at the centre and thus allows us to discover the world anew again and again. Here it is more than a mere document: it is a sign-like condensate that the viewer has to unfold in a discourse.
Dietewich's found objects are a kind of photographic "écriture automatique" with fragments of reality. As remnants of culture that have coagulated into form, they provide the imagination with a matrix to which it can cling cultural forms of encoding in order to see the world through different eyes. The photographs oscillate between a pure rendering of the amorphous and a structuring of what is seen, in which the viewer believes to glimpse objects and pictorial representations. The asphalt and wall pictures become projection surfaces of the imagination. The photographs are a reproduction of chaos and its structuring at the same time. This is what makes them so enigmatic.
In the photographic print, the visual fragments coincide with the image carrier. The results are reminiscent of abstract artworks and at the same time pure photography. When looking at the works, it is difficult not to see the great works of painting that are now cavorting in our collective memory.

(Dr. Otto Rothfuss, Stuttgart)