Marcel Weber

It may sound strange but I am often melancholic. Since my childhood I have had this diffuse feeling of sadness – the sadness about the inadequacy of the world. I am not an unhappy person but I am probably happy when I am melancholic. In my opinion, melancholy also contains a motivation and an inspiration that people have always processed in the form of art. I like books where the hero dies in the end. I like the view back into the past. I like melancholic music. I like the art of romance. I like the original, the wild, the mystical. This is where my fascination for the sea comes from, for the power behind it. For rough and rugged mountains. For the view into the stars. I like an original, almost mystical picture of the world, a romantic picture of times past. I try to find that in my photography and that’s what I have been painting on paper since my childhood. I like the sad in the beautiful.

To come back to my trip… After my reunion with the sea, after almost 10 years, the feeling of wanderlust was suddenly in me once again and it didn’t take long until I had to visit the sea again. My partner and I camped in Northern Germany in autumn 2017 and visited different islands. The Danish island Römo fascinated me the most. It was a beautiful autumn day, where sun, long shadows, rain and rainbows alternated. It was the northernmost place I visited at that time. And in this kind of landscape I felt something that made me remember something I seemed to have forgotten a long time ago. In the evening I sat there and knew that I had to go further north. As a child I dreamt of Iceland and now this dream came back to live within me. I was always fascinated by the north – of discoverers and stories from the ice – of those who set out to go where no one had gone before: Discoverers, treasure hunters and whalers, of all those who went north. And at that time, at the southernmost edge of Denmark, I had no exact idea of the north. But I heard the call of the north for the first time.