I came to Leporello through drawing in the oriental city.

In Damascus, the water pipes were being renewed and so the streets were huge construction sites with mountains of excavated sand, all unsecured. I climbed onto these viewing platforms with folded sheets of paper and sketched the city in my improvised sketchbook despite the wind and dust. I soon began to mark the backs as well.

Since then, I have been preparing hand-sized folds of thick paper for every trip, every exploration.

Leporellos were created in Aleppo, Cairo, Genoa and also in Neukölln. For the exhibition “The Other Garden” I created an entire museum room with leporello walls in watercolor and ink, some of which also had cutouts.

Leporello albums with photographic city views have been around since 1890. They combine both genres and are “open books”, so to speak.

The fanfold is a spatial relative of the book, it can be a relief, a surface or describe a closed, round shape when the two ends touch. Due to its two-sidedness, it is an extremely lively analog medium for telling stories.

In my latest work, the black (w)hole leporellos, I thematize “black holes” and the “black whole” at the same time in these dystopian times.