“WO MICH NIEMAND KENNT”
Eduard Bigas about Walter Benjamin
22nd November – 30th January 2026
Eduard Bigas, born in 1969 in the Catalan town of Palafrugell, approaches in his new exhibition one of the most influential intellectual figures of the 20th century: Walter Benjamin. For Bigas, Benjamin is not only a historical figure of his time, but a metaphorical presence whose thought continues to resonate in our present – a present once again shaped by political upheavals, technological acceleration, and authoritarian tendencies.
Bigas’s own biographical position between Catalonia and Berlin forms, in a peculiar way, a circle: not far from his birthplace lies Portbou, where Benjamin died in 1940 while fleeing the National Socialists; Berlin, Benjamin’s birthplace, is today Bigas’s home and artistic centre. This geographical and intellectual topography forms the backdrop of his artistic engagement.
In “Wo mich Niemand kennt”, Bigas takes up central motifs of Benjamin’s thought – fragmentation, the aura of the artwork, and the tension between originality and reproduction. His works move between collage, ink on paper, graphite drawing on canvas, and conceptual photography. Through the montage of visual fragments, a polyphonic universe emerges that mirrors Benjamin’s own method of thinking.
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a note in Benjamin’s final letter:
“It is in a small village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life will come to an end.”
This sentence becomes a guiding motif, echoing throughout the works with a melancholic yet poetic resonance. Bigas draws inspiration from Benjamin’s writings such as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the Sonette. At the same time, his visual language opens an intuitive, poetic, and questioning access to Benjamin. His art invites viewers not to search for definitive answers, but to follow the open paths of Benjamin’s thinking and allow them to unfold anew.
In “Wo mich Niemand kennt”, memory, place, and philosophy condense into a quiet homage to Walter Benjamin – and at the same time into a reflection on our own present.
