Tobias Zielony: Wolfen

The first multilayer colour film was developed in 1936 at the Agfa Filmfabrik Wolfen; the factory, now operating as ORWO Filmfabrik (ORiginal WOlfen), became the most important producer of colour film in East Germany. Today, all that is left at the site is the small company Filmotec, which produces a special archival film with long-term stability that can be inscribed with digital data in the form of QR codes. The photo book Wolfen is made up of a mix of different layers: photographs taken by Tobias Zielony in Wolfen-Bitterfeld; the storing of these images in Filmotec’s archive film format; and a text that switches between essay and science fiction in a bid to express an untold story, a story of darkness and cold, of dwindling work in the film factory, most of which was carried out by women — or by forced labourers in the period up to 1945. In the era of analogue film, photographic processing had to be done in the dark: Zielony’s work tackles this idea on a biographical, physical, and historical level.