Memory as a living, playful tool

The First Third … And So Many Beginnings

I’ve just wrapped up the first third of my residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude. The start has been full of encounters, coincidences, and ideas racing through my mind. In the middle of all that, I completed and showed my interactive project Numbers and Squares at the summer edition of Open Solitude – a project I brought here as a well-formed idea and finished on site, ready for people to experience.

In Numbers and Squares, an old recording becomes the seed for an interactive installation that blends play with personal archive. Visitors step into a retro-styled grid of numbered squares, each hiding a question, a word, and a fragment of the artist’s family history. Layer by layer, these unlocked memories reveal everyday life in exile, filmed by family members and woven with reflections on cultural identity, longing, and resilience. Developed at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2025 with programmer Lena Irmler, the work invites audiences to explore how memory can be both a game and a living archive.

An Archive That Came Back to Me

Shortly after my journey to Akademie Schloss Solitude, I had a real scare. My bag of Hi8 tapes – the ones I brought to keep working on my family archive – got lost at the airport. For a moment, it felt like a piece of memory I depend on had just slipped away. A few days later, it arrived in the mail, like the thread of the project had been put back in my hands. I also had with me a bag of cassette tapes with recorded family phone calls. As I digitized and revisited these sounds and images, new layers of the story began to surface. Then, in a flea market in Stuttgart, I stumbled upon a family photo album that looked uncannily like my own family’s album. That strange resemblance sparked the idea for a project connecting two memories – one I know by heart, and another that’s a mystery – yet somehow, they look almost the same.

 

A Project Waiting for Winter

Before arriving, I had started Inside the Box, a project about how an entire place could be built from the archive – from photographs, phone calls, and videos. Here at Schloss Solitude, I’m not building it yet. Instead, I’m diving into the cassette tapes that made their way back to me, digitizing them and uncovering new threads for the story.

Alongside this, the flea market album I found has sparked a different idea – a separate work that could bring it together with my own family album, and possibly photographs from other families who wish to participate. For now, my focus is on preparing the next iteration of Inside the Box for the winter edition of Open Solitude.

Plans and Open Horizons

The next two-thirds of my residency feel like two open horizons: finishing the projects that have started taking shape here, and welcoming new ideas that keep emerging. I’m also trying to give a clearer path to ideas that have been with me for a long time: Should I continue my academic studies, or keep going with my journey of research and experimentation through art residencies that give me the joy of discovery and the freedom to create?

Between all these questions, I’m mapping out how to share these projects in ways that invite the audience to step into them – to explore, to interact. For me, my personal and family archive isn’t just raw material. It’s a space for research and experimentation, one that can open readings that stretch from the intimate and personal to the political and historical. And I’m looking forward to opening it up even more – to collaborations, to exhibitions, and to letting these works live fully in the hands of an audience and out in the world.