b’nerd

Was Austauschstudenten in Ilmenau für Projekte erledigen, um einen Schein zu bekommen :-)

The main goal of this project was to show how the University of Ilmenau and its surroundings look like through international photographic eyes. By making photos of the town Ilmenau, university campus and other places we have visited during our stay here, we wanted to catch their special atmosphere. We tried to picture the unusual moments and situations that we met during last semester and express them from our view, through “our eyes”. We did not want to show the typical signs and symbols of the University or the town Ilmenau, we rather wanted to show something else – something what is not too explicit at first sight for locals, but what is explicit or extraordinary for us.

As international visitors we have found a lot of smaller or bigger distinctions between local life and life in our home countries. Some things that are taken as the matter of course here seemed very often unusual to us – sometimes in a good sense, sometimes also more or less bizarre.

Why are the people here doing this and that? Why are they behaving so and so? Our aim was simply to catch the “cultural shock” which we during our stay at the University of Ilmenau sometimes felt.

The pictures are always showed as a pair: one photo shows Ilmenau with all its particularity, as we have seen it through our “international eyes”. The second one then shows the same situation, but from our “home eyes”, meaning from the view which we know from our countries or cultures.