Memory Without Walls

Memory Without Walls premiered at Berlin Art Week, 2022 with the Mauer Exhibition; a project which “invites you to Reimagine the Berlin wall.“

Artist Statement

When I began to research life in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I wondered what I might have done if I had been trapped in East Germany. I imagined that I would have been too afraid to make a move. I became fascinated by the daring and imaginative ways people found to escape, and decided to focus on two escapes in particular for this piece.

The escape in a hot air balloon in 1979 orchestrated by Hans Strelczyk and Gunter Wetzel and their wives and children. Eight people crossed the border to West Germany in a homemade hot air balloon.

East German acrobat Horst Klein escaped on a “tightrope” in early 1963. Klein turned an unused high-tension cable that stretched over the wall into a tightrope over the wall.

In my interview with neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, we talked about the relationship between memory and imagination. Schiller observed:

People who suffer from PTSD cannot access their imagination when remembering a trauma. Because of this their traumatic memories remain stuck. Psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk explains in his book The Body Keeps the Score:

“When compulsively pulled back to the past without imagination, there is no hope. Imagination is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true.”

I wanted to tap into this idea of human creativity in the face of repression. There's this seemingly impenetrable wall, but the tightrope and hot air balloon escapees did not try to directly confront it, they floated above and swung over it.

When we can't solve a problem, we often say “I'm hitting my head against a wall.” We all get stuck and are held back by mental and emotional walls. What enables us to get past our inner walls is our ability to think outside the box and approach a problem creatively in unexpected ways.

I thought of the massive weight of the wall and the lightness of imagination and hope. I love the idea of the whimsy and lightness of imagination removing this heavy obstacle. Our minds are so powerful that we can solve seemingly impenetrable problems.

Memory Without Walls explores how we can break through the traumatic walls of memory with imagination. Imagination is the launchpad for hopes and dreams for our futures. Living within the confines of traumatic memories limits what we are able to plan for our futures. Freeing traumatic memories and melding them with imagination opens up a new way of dreaming, thinking and living.

Artistic Process

The project is comprised of three paintings, a short film and animated NFTs. Using archival photographs and footage as a point of departure, I created 24,000 painting stills and edited them down to approximately 15,000, which I put into motion at 30/fps to create the animation. Method and meaning are intertwined as the images start as “realistic” and merge with imagination in paintings that drip, layer and transform, a metaphor for the way we remember and merge memory with imagination.