Accepting the steirischer herbst invitation to its 50th anniversary, in March 2017 I entered the room where all regional, national and international press releases concerning the festival have been filed for the past fifty years. A total of around 100,000 cut-out articles glued on A4 sheets or whole newspaper pages folded in A4 format. When I opened the first files from 1967, some of the articles dropped out as the glue had dried out over time. On the back of one article, that was cut out at a bit of an angle, there was a remarkable picture in the bleed area that had no bearing whatsoever on steirischer herbst, but which had been unintentionally archived too. I then went about viewing the archive for other strays. You find them in practically all archives and they open up parallel side stories. Peter Piller

For more than twenty years Peter Piller (born 1968 in Germany) has been making peripheral excursions, or Peripheriewanderungen (Periphery Walks) in various European cities. In Hamburg, the Ruhr region, Bonn, Graz, and Barcelona he has explored small sections of areas marking the outer borders of urban settlement in cities and regions of varying size. In carrying out these walks Piller follows things that catch his eye as well as cues from his memory, ending his excursion once he feels unable to take in anything more. When something particularly interests him on one of his explorations, he departs from his determined routes, wanders around through the area, or even simply waits for a key moment. Archives of photographs result, which he subsequently expands upon in his studio with his Erinnerungszeichnungen (Drawings from Memory). In these mental maps the medium of drawing supplements that of photography and vice versa.

Published on occasion of steirischer herbst
September 22nd - October 15th, 2017