The series seeks an examination on the concept of home. I accompany my mother's return to the place where she grew up: a farm in southern Germany. In the confrontation of an idealizing view and the distance from the actual place today, tensions between familiarity and strangeness, constancy and change become visible. They clarify how home and origin can both carry and constrict.

The farming dynasty of my maternal family has existed for several generations. In the 1960s, my grandparents' farm was moved from the village center and rebuilt in the surrounding area as a resettlement. Their six children were heavily involved, as the farm had to be cultivated intensively due to its small size in order to remain profitable. It was the last generation in which it could still be run successfully.

On the one hand a retrospective, on the other a record of the present and the material disappearance of home, the work is about the change of perspective that goes hand in hand with aging and spatial distance. The title (engl. Sometimes the sky above us is open) is a quote from a letter my mother wrote to her parents in 1999, which I found by accident in the cabinet during the process. In it, she congratulates them both on their birthdays.