My work as a memory researcher lies at the intersection of methodological archaeology and creative object art.
As a first step, aligned with archaeological and scientific methodology, I systematically explore the material traces of past everyday worlds in so-called ‘lost places’, as well as at illegal rubbish dumps and on urban wasteland.
In other words, places that stand as silent witnesses to individual lives that have since faded away. Places that are not regarded by classical archaeology as significant historical monuments or archaeological sites.
Yet even the waste, the scrap discarded here constitutes a telling legacy of human activity. It represents a cultural asset, even if the objects have fallen out of their original cycle of use.
These objects not only reveal the existence and fates of their former owners, which are etched into the signs of wear and tear, but also point directly to the social processes of thoughtless abandonment and forgetting.
However, these very mundane, and often damaged, remnants of the ordinary require a second step – an actively carried out process of condensation – in order to appreciate them anew.
As an object-artist, in a second step I reinterpret the original narrative of objects from an aesthetic perspective. In three-dimensional assemblages or installations, I breathe new life into forgotten human stories by subjectively transforming them into spaces of emotional experience.
Unlike traditional recycled art, my focus here is not on the material value alone or on the recombination of disparate elements, but on the contextual nature of the found objects – that is, their categorisation according to the specific context in which they were found.