The VAL project marks, in artistic terms, my return to the small town of Kandern in the southern Black Forest, where I grew up. The series of 50 colour photographs forms an annual cycle in which I set out in search of landscapes, moods and situations that embody the essence of life and activity in the valley regions between Alsace and the Black Forest: scenes of time preserved, places of agriculture and the intense relationship between humans and nature, traces of faith. In dialogue with one another, these visual worlds walk a tightrope between isolation and security, memory and the present, death and new beginnings, flight and return; forming interwoven realities that coexist side by side.