Zentrum is a collection of photographs taken in the city of Vienna in 2024 - 2025. The photography is inspired by street photography, urban minimalism and the exploration of the urban surroundings in which the personal life is located. Similarities appear to photography movements such as the New Topographics in the 1970s that focused on man-altered landscapes.

The photography and its exploration of the urban environment inspired new musical interfaces, such as the cartographic sound device Atlas or the manifested childhood  memories with Ratter. 

A series of photographs was first presented at the exhibition Zentrum at Xian, Vienna, 2025. Exhibited as pigment prints in 30cm x 42cm which were mounted on roll paper.

The exhibition is accompanied by the text ZENTRUM – Through sonorous cliffs and paper crossroads by Gabriela Gordillo (see below).

Additionally the photozine Zentrum #1 was printed and released during the exhibition. It presents the exhibited black and white photographs and more on 32 pages.

more work at foto.jensvetter.de

Zentrum #1 by Jens Vetter. photozine, 2025

Selection of photographs printed in ZENTRUM #1

Exhibition view - Zentrum at Xian, Vienna 2025

exhibition of the photo series Zentrum at Xian Vienna. Photos © Jens Vetter, 2025.

exhibition view - Zentrum © Jens Vetter at Xian Vienna 2025

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The exhibition is accompanied by this text Through sonorous cliffs and paper crossroads by Gabriela Gordillo.
(PDF)

ZENTRUM

Through sonorous cliffs and paper crossroads

by Gabriela Gordillo

Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and windows in the houses, though nothing in them possesses a special beauty or rarity. Zora's secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced.  – Invisible Cities, Italo calvino

The cityscape holds shapes and reflections of a constructed reality, one that is a collective agreement, overlapping with the filter of the individual perspective. As a child, space opens up as a mesh of textures and materials to discover, but when we grow up, we “think we know” and forget curiosity in the threshold of small things. In Jens Vetter’s exhibition Zentrum, three pieces on display suggest a space to explore. Extracted from the everyday scenery, the photographs and interactive objects suggest a place that reminds us of a familiar city, one that we have not seen before.

Jens Vetter took seriously the mission to make walks in the city a source of inspiration. Following a renewed aim to explore photography, his wandering became visual and connected to the senses. In the same way that the camera captures traces of light, the space captured the soul of the artist. The photographic series Zentrum deconstructs the landscape into geometric shapes, patterns, ruins of space, to be re-arranged. A gaze that points at details that were silently always part of the view.

The resulting black and white photographs are printed and mounted on roll paper. The same paper that sounds scratchy and textured when it wrinkles. As material, paper is the universe of the sketch, of crafted models and utopic scenarios. Paper is the connection between the child, the amateur, the dreamer and the artist.

The sound object Atlas, embodied in a steering wheel and three loudspeakers, drives us through an imaginary map of sonorous cliffs made out of paper sounds. Turning “left and right” translates into “back and forth” in a 42-second sound file, linked to the speed of the driving gesture. Through the interpolation of movement and duration, time stretches in unpredictable ways. Some parts of this sonorous parkour are more lurid, with folds and turbulences, while others are porous and smooth. What a ride! Paradoxically, the longer you play with the sound it becomes increasingly ungraspable.

The atlas has these qualities: it reveals the form of cities that do not yet have a form or a name. (…) The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. – Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Through the dual action of reading and affecting sound, new versions of an ephemeral territory unfold. Using sound as a medium, Atlas overcomes the omnipresence of cartographic representation to focus on the trajectory, shape bending and becoming.

On the other side of the room, Ratter plays a different song. Inspired by the memory of clattering on a fence as a child, a metal stick clatters across metal rods, from left to right, when activated by a foot pedal. Ratter plays itself, emancipated from the passerby but leaving space for exchange, since it’s the visitor who decides when to start and stop the action.

The work’s name refers to the sound of rattling, similar to clacking, tapping, chiming… Once the metal stick clacks, an elongated clack-clack-clack-clack performs an invisible player that activates the acoustics of the structure. The simplicity of this action opposes the complex mechanism that makes possible its autonomous movement via electronics and robotic principles. Nevertheless, the experience of this piece brings its playfulness to the foreground rather than its technicalities.

By extracting elements from the density of public space and placing them inside the gallery, a new scenario appears. One presented as a participatory performance, configured by sound, events and re-purposed interfaces. It proposes a non-linear order across variable durations, where one can get lost in a state of flow. The space allows daydreaming and taking the time to explore each work.

While playing with the idea of cartography, technical devices and urban elements, this exhibition deconstructs the tools of modern objectivity in playful elements that offer no measures and calculations, but instead, poetry. In both works, Atlas and Ratter, Vetter extracts the objects from their original context and design function. The steering wheel does not drive a vehicle and the metal fence does not enclose or separate a space. However, they keep their symbolic reference to tell a story and suggest modes of interaction.

This suggests new ideas in our relationship to the city, addressing not only our way to inhabit it but also the way to design it. In “Composing the City” Sara Adhitya says that “the focus of the city-maker is not necessarily on the design of discrete and static urban elements but on the quality of performances which these elements collectively inspire.“  She refers to the city as an instrument and the role of urban planners to be closer to the one of composers. Should then artists and performers be consultants in the process of city-making? A change of perspective seems to refresh what we “think we know”.

The pieces presented in Zentrum suggest a city through its own destruction. Tiring down pre-existing objects, materials, crashed paper, becomes the creative act. They are pieces of a building that reverses the processes of building itself. Through putting these fragments together, rather than collapsing, the work rises up. What we see in this exhibition stays with us as we leave the room and walk down the street, in the sound of our steps, the glimpses of light hitting the concrete and the encounter with the next fence on the way.

Sara Adhitya, “Composing the city, Applying music-making crafts to city-making processes” in Sonic Urbanism. Edited by &beyond for Theatrum Mundi, Greca, Artes Gráficas, 2019

Calvino Italo, Invisible Cities, Vintage, London 1997