Mitra - Pólo de Inovação Social / Pavilhão D

Beco da Mitra, 1950-051 Lisboa

10 . 10 . 2026 → 15 . 11 . 2026

thursday - sunday → 02:30 pm – 06:30 pm

Artist

Marc Schroeder

Marc Schroeder (*1974, Luxembourg) became a photographer in 2009. Mostly self-taught, he prefers to work on long-term projects. His practice blends personal documentation with visual storytelling and has lately shifted towards projects in which the representation of the human figure plays a secondary role. Memory, transience and the lingering traces of a human presence nevertheless thread their way through his work. Marc shares his life between his native Luxembourg, Lisbon and Berlin.

On 16 December 1944 Stalin signed Order 7161ss, the secret command to “mobilise and detain all Germans capable of working, including men aged 17 to 45 years and women 18 to 30 years” from Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. Their subsequent deportation to forced labour camps - primarily located in the Donbas region in today’s Ukraine - was intended to help reconstruct the Soviet Union and was a form of reparations for the destruction caused by the Second World War. A total of 112,480 men and women were deported. The majority of them – 69,332 individuals – were Germans from Romania. Many deportees died from the harsh labour conditions, freezing temperatures and insufficient nutrition in the camps. All those who had survived the hunger and misery were able to return to Romania in late 1949.

Marc Schroeder started his project in 2012 and over the following three years managed to meet 40 former deportees from different communities within Romania. Photographing and interviewing the survivors was a ‘last chance’ endeavour; they had been among the youngest deportees in 1945 and, since their encounter with Marc, most of them have passed away.

The project culminated with the publication of the photo-text book ORDER 7161 by The Eriskay Connection in 2021. ORDER 7161 was shortlisted for the 2022 Paris Photo - Aperture First PhotoBook Award and in 2023, the book was awarded the Gold Medal of the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis in the documentary photography category.