Consisting of 1078 Polaroid photos of abstract blue skies above Nazi concentration camps, the work is an unsettling way of looking directly at an unspeakable trauma that is also a fading collective memory.


Over a six­-year period, Anton Kusters researched and photographed a blue sky at the last known location of every former Nazi Germany SS concentration camp and killing center across Europe. These camps existed for 4432 days, from 1933 to 1945, in a highly organized sys­tem of imprisonment, forced labor, and mur­der. More than half of these 1078 sites (concentration camps) have no visual remains today. Every photograph is manually blind­stamped with the number of victims beneath that sky, as well as its gps coordinates. For The Blue Skies Project Belgian artist Anton Kusters (b. 1974) was nominated for the Prix Pictet 2019, and was a finalist for the 2020 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. The Blue Skies Project is curated by Monica Allende, and the exhibition installa­tion is accompanied by a 13 year long tracking audio/visual piece by sound artist and com­poser Ruben Samama.