RESCUE THE FIRE

Berlin, 1993. Photographer and artist Jürgen Baldiga battles HIV. In the 1990s, the AIDS epidemic is reaching a climax that no one had expected. The infected bodies and their stories disappear from the public eye, as though they'd never existed. Through the death of his friends and subsequently his own, Baldiga becomes a chronicler of his time: "I am taking a picture. I am photographing the world. I exist." Identity and history disappear without the persistence of memory. Up until the final days of his life, Jürgen Baldiga documents an exodus to which he himself also succumbs. RESCUE THE FIRE draws attention to a piece of West Berlin history and the voices of the collective memory.