The residency Bound With the Living: Rehearsals for an Unwritten History is an experimental, collaborative research project that has been developing since 2019. It is built around objects of historical and personal value that carry the histories of their owners and the experiences they have endured. The method is the séance: participants gather around a table in a darkened room, and a medium works in dialogue with an absent or deceased subject at the heart of the research.

Participants encounter ancestors and historical ruptures through objects marked by violence, displacement and loss. Earlier objects have included a wooden box believed to have been looted from a Palestinian family during the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre and a violin looted by a Wehrmacht officer. Rather than reconstructing a fixed past, the project rehearses relationships to histories that remain fragmentary and unresolved, and holds space for questions and partial knowledge.

The residency is carried out by Hagar Ophir, Juna Suleiman, Miriam Schickler and Hana Umeda, and is part of the All The Rivers series at ausland. A public sharing day follows on 24 October.

Mehr erfahren