This photo book accompanies the exhibition at the Haus der Graphischen Sammlung in Freiburg.

The exhibition “6 August 1870” at the Haus der Graphischen Sammlung in Freiburg presents a seventy-part photographic cycle by Marcel van Eeden that investigates the entanglements of nationalism, colonialism, and racism from the Franco-Prussian War to the present.

In this project, van Eeden takes as his starting point the story of Abdel Kader Ben Lahcen, a colonial soldier from North Africa who died in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War and whose remains entered the anatomical collection of Alexander Ecker at the University of Freiburg, where they remained unburied and never repatriated. Through black-and-white photography and quotations from historical documents, he traces this biography from battlefields in Alsace and Baden to contemporary sites in Tunisia and Algeria, making visible a history that had long been obscured in scientific collections. The exhibition is organized by the Museum für Neue Kunst in cooperation with the University of Freiburg’s provenance research on colonial scientific collections and is complemented by works from students at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, who respond to van Eeden’s series with their own artistic reflections.