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Awarded by Stiftung Buchkunst, “Most Beautiful German Books 2014”.

“There are words that sound too narrow and finite, underlying the real nature and complexity of their meaning, words that are nothing but codes, in an exercise of comfortable simplification. “Insanity” is one of them. Peter Granser opens countless windows on a world that is unknown – and consequently feared, set aside, intentionally or not but perhaps for the specific purpose that forgets its existence – and he does so by replacing words with photography. The first communication is what we put in place for ourselves when we try to interpret what is around us, even before we attempt any form of sharing, and words come later, to rethink what is the origin of our own experience, that is purely perceptual. It is when words fail, when they cannot be lined up and rearranged, that we feel inadequate when facing a world where we think we don’t belong, while it is our own world, though ruled by a logic that is much more simple and basic as to be disarming. It’s up to the viewer looking out of the windows that Peter Granser opened, it’s up to us to dig below the surface, and deprive us of the rules now settled in our communication, to catch the slightest gap between what exists and what we only choose to call real.”

review by Andrea Filippin