In the year 2011, two artists meet by chance in the old town of Biel/Bienne, the second largest bilingual city in Switzerland. Didier Cataldo, born in Biel/Bienne, has lived in France for more than 20 years. eLisa Pancratz moved to Switzerland a few months before their first meeting. The “languages” and their diversity that meet within this artistic discourse become the core of their photographic project 9+, which started in 2013.

Together they visit different “places of recollection” in Biel/Bienne and its region. Places that bear emotional bonds for one of the two and often none for the other. For him they are closely connected to his childhood and youth. For her, on the other hand, they evoke different memories which are strongly tied to her first contact to the then unknown city and its surroundings.

The photographs of the two are created mostly at the same time at the chosen places, as a photographic inventory of the present. Through this process, their different attentiveness, perceptions and biographies always meet. Linked through moments of composition and the shutter release cable, as a reference to the simultaneous moment of creation, their stories in the “here and now” of the visited locations are newly told.

The pair use different, analog media for this project. Didier Cataldo takes his pictures with a twin-lens medium-format camera using black and white negatives. eLisa Pancratz works with instant colour cameras and an old  SX-70-Landcamera, the photographic results of which often show shifts in colour.

Planned as a long-term project, a visual dialogue between two humans develops, about a city and its surroundings, but not least about themselves, which can reflect the origin of their encounter. As a result, a photographic wall remains, a kaleidoscopically broken image of a city and its region, in whose centre the location of their first meeting lies.