Ruins, resurrected | Ruinen, auferstanden (2022 and ongoing)

An artistic research on transgenerational traumas and their transmission, a work in progress utilizing walking as artistic practice in order to connect and reconcile multiple timelines of historic, present and future violence. Contextualizing the human capacity to process complex realities when allowing oneself to not have a definite answer to a(ny) question. Examining memorial and archival practices.

"Reconciliation" connects the town of Gardelegen with the small village Söllenthin - a walking distance of roughly 165km. The walk took me along the rivers Havel and Elbe and crossed the region "Altmark" to be completed at the Memorial Site "Feldscheune Isenschnibbe" where over 1000 people were burned alive, by German soldiers and civilians on April 13th 1945. Only two weeks later the girls and women of Söllenthin became victims of rape as war crime, commited by Soviet soldiers. When walking along former battle sites of the 2nd World War, very close to what later became the border between East and West Germany, I came to realize that there are no Memorial Sites for these women, their children and hardly any for all those who resisted the violence, fought it or had to surrender causing trauma to unfold in all following generations.

9 walks have been completed - the project had a closure ceremony framed by the re-routing residency at Künstlerhof Frohnau, on the former death-strip of the Berlin wall.

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