Zine – ”Chains underwater freak me out.“The project was started in the sixth semester at DHBW Ravensburg and continued as a free project after completing the Bachelor's degree.
© 2025/05

Supervising lecturer:
Florain Tscharf

Conceptional support:
Marie-Luise Weier
Prof. Dr. Holger Lund

Realization support:
Robert Hak
Jürgen Knubben
Youngblood Artspace
Forum Kunst Rottweil
* Hannes Soballa
Carl Soballa
Jan Renk
Max Mager
Risofort
When I was a child, I saw a cartoon where a polar bear was climbing a buoy. The buoy was like any other tethered underwater with a chain. Just thinking about this fact drove me crazy. Why would the polar bear climb it? Is he not afraid? I could not imagine ­getting close to that buoy myself.
Only a year ago, I learned why. The fear of human-made ­objects submerged in water is called submechanophobia. I learned about it on Reddit. The subreddit r/submechanophobia is a collection of images that trigger something in me—a feeling somewhere between trepidation, anxiety and fascination. These images show a variety of different submerged ­human-made objects: Wrecks, ­infrastructure like the legs of oil rigs, ship propellers, submarines as well as chains. Chains underwater freak me out. Chains of anchors, chains of machines, or chains of buoys. The images of these chains are the most intense ones, they have the strongest effect on me.
This Zine and the essay in it, try to find the threshholds for my fear of chains underwater.

90 × 170 mm | 16 pages | RISO Print with two colors | Fedrigoni Arena White Rough 120g/m² | limited edition of 75 prints