BS
Adrian, since last year you have been travelling through Eu- rope and more recently through the U.S. to photograph failed construction projects. Why?

‍AR
I‘ve always been fascinated by large projects the construction of which has swallowed up huge amounts of money, and which have never been in operation or only for a short time. For example, the nuclear power plants Kalkar or Mühlheim Kärlich. I also like architecture and landscape photography, as wellas landscape painting. In this project I‘m able to combine my preferences. In the course of time it has expanded a lot, mean- while I am not only photographing big projects, but I am also looking for failure in the small things.

‍BS
What fascinates you about failure?
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‍AR
That it is a very human subject, an expression of the Conditio Humana, everyone knows it, everyone has experienced it. What particularly interests me about it is the ambivalence inherent in defeat and the transformation that defeats regularly bring with them. By investigating the interaction between success and failure, I would like to ask whether the negative connotation of failure, a phenomenon that is particularly prevalent in German culture, is justified.In science, for example, failure is an essential part of gaining knowledge; falsifying a thesis is part of the scientific process. I raise the question as to whether this cannot or must not be a general attitude towards failure. That every failure can also be a starting point or again.

‍BS
A process of learning and gradual improvement. With the buildings you photographed, however, the path to knowledge was extremely expensive.
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‍AR
That‘s true. The fast breeder in Kalkar was never in operation and cost around seven billion Deutschmarks. In North Dakota I photographed a rocket base that was completed in the mid-1970s It cost five billion U.S. dollars, which would be almost 24 billion dollars according to today‘s purchasing power. In the case of the buildings for the Olympic Games in Athens, many of which remain in disuse today, we still don‘t know how many millions they devoured. These are all incredible money sinkholes. And it is by no means the case that something has been learned from all these failures. All you have to do is watch the Olympics. Every four years, states sink an incredible amount of money for sports facilities, which are then never used again after the games. In Rio it was the same as in Athens. And the World Cup stadium in Manaus is now used as a parking lot for buses because Manaus has no football club that could play on a stadium of this huge size. It‘s crazy.

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