Within the work of ARCHIVES VIVANTES Sinje Dillenkofer analyses the meaning of Archive and importance to artistically bring it back to live. Drawing on artefacts in the private Michael Hein print collection and the Humboldt-Collection Hein at the Stadtmuseum Berlin, the artist researches various forms of representing the historical figure of Alexander von Humboldt, his theories and the idea of the archive as such. She examines different media and forms of reality and visualizes them linked in formally and conceptually new ways.

Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin

Stadtgalerie Bad Soden am Taunus, 2019

The State Library in Berlin was able to acquire the nine American Travel Journals, (1799-1804), for the sum of twelve million euros in 2013. Sinje Dillenkofer has now been given the possibility of translating them artistically.

Museum bei der Kaiserpfalz im Kulturforum Ingelheim, 2022

Stadtmuseum Berlin, Humboldt-Collection Hein

The three-part work has its starting point in Alexander von Humboldt’s profile of the Pico del Teide volcano on Tenerife in his travelogue ‛Atlas géographique et physique des régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent’, Paris 1814. The emblematic diagram charts and records every plant Humboldt and Leopold von Buch encountered on the mountain with the range of altitude at which it was found. Sinje Dillenkofer placed those plant names in white boxes and stacked them up to to reconstruct the mountain as a new autonomous entity. To the left and right of the image of this mountain are views of the inside of a drawer from a prints and drawings cabinet at the Humboldt Archive at the Märkisches Stadtmuseum in Berlin.
Each of the three images is dominated by geometric forms and the colours black and white. Black seems to fuse all the colours of nature and to embody the darkness of the UV-protected archive, of the past, of the starry night sky and the infinity of the universe enveloping the mountain. White becomes the symbol of light and life, which exists in the chlorophyll of the plants and which fills the interior of mountain in the form of little white boxes. In the two other images, the slits in the base of an archival drawer, lit from below, glow white. Light seems to flood history, the past and the archive and to infuse them with radiant new life.

KOSMOS 1 refers to the visual perception of nature. In this picture, the six basic colours that define the chromatic extremes of the RGB colour space of photography, are superimposed on an atmospheric shot of the Pico del Teide beneath a starry night sky. The arrangement of flat colour bars can be read as a symbol of the harmonious union of heaven and earth, macrocosm and microcosm, man and nature, but also as the test card or disruption pattern of a tv station and, with it, of the fragility of this longed-for, media-conveyed image of the harmony of nature.

On invitation of the Museum bei der Kaiserpfalz as the artist and curator Sinje Dillenkofer pursued her photographic investigation in six German collection archives, realized the publication ARCHIVES VIVANTES and the film MIRROR OF NATURE.
She investigates the meaning of “archive”, the way we treat ‘nature’ and ‘the nature of man’, which she sees reflected in our handling of ‘nature’. Her artist’s conceptual observations and photographs are based on specimens, artefacts, charts and writings by the ornithologist Carlo von Erlanger from Ingelheim (1872-1904) and the explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1869) as well as his latter’s theories, which are still significant today. The two pioneering explorers were chosen because they exemplify different approaches to nature.