Archivo de Indias en Seville, Spain, 2001/2020

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg has documented the monumental archive of the Spanish colonial power in Seville in an impressive series – images that give an idea of ​​what the shelves house: stories of voyages of discovery, of the hubris of the rulers and momentous documents such as the treaty to divide the world.

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s previously unpublished, historically unique photographs show the Archivo General de Indias in Seville before its general renovation in 2001. 300 years of Spanish colonial history in America have been archived here since 1785, 8,000 maps and around 90 million documents – including Columbus’ logbook as well as the famous “Treaty of Tordesillas”, in which in 1494 the kings of Portugal and Spain, mediated by the Pope, drew a line through the Atlantic and thus divided the newly discovered and yet to be discovered countries of the world among themselves.

In her work, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg repeatedly explores human-made border regions and places outside of Western perception, as most recently in her exhibition The Land in Between at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris. The photographer lives in Düsseldorf.The author Martin Zimmermann is Professor of Ancient History at LMU Munich and spokesman for the German Historians’ Day in 2021. His most recent publications were: violence. The Dark Side of Antiquity and The Strangest Places of Antiquity.Ursula Schulz-Dornburg and Martin Zimmermann have been friends for many years

Exhibition at the Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory

Die Teilung der Welt, 2020