>>Zu Verschenken<< is a project that came to mind while working at a delivery company last summer. As I navigated the city and biked through new neighborhoods, I couldn’t help but notice the amount of ‘‘Sperrmüll’’ that Germans regularly discard onto the streets. Furniture, clothes, and electrical appliances are all part of this “recycling” culture of sorts, but it often seems more like creating waste than anything else.

As I kept coming across these piles of items with “zu verschenken” (free to take) signs, I couldn’t help but wonder about their stories. Were they put on the street for being old? Did the owners buy new items? Or maybe they had to move in a rush and just left everything behind? This abandonment issue got me thinking about how we tend to accept things as they are, without considering the circumstances that led to them.

In a similar vein, I began to draw parallels to the way society addresses homelessness. The prevalence of individuals living on the streets has become so normalized that we often dehumanize them, treating them as objects left for someone else to deal with.

Presented as my BA final project, the goal behind it is to provoke introspection on the issue at hand. It does so through a series of photographs capturing the objects I encountered during my time working in this context. These images serve as a visual narrative, encouraging viewers to ponder about the interconnected themes of consumption, waste, and the often unseen human stories behind them.