The project »Ramifications« deals with the process of filling gaps in the context of transgenerational trauma. It is not about the actual memories a person has made, but about the distortions and echoes of memories that are passed on to others.
Through family narratives, memories that have not been experienced themselves merge with a person's own identity story. Yet, due to the incompleteness and contradictoriness of these narrated memories, they become derivations of what supposedly happened and are therefore unintentionally fictionalised.
Associated contexts in the unconscious that attempt to make the intangible tangible give rise to new memory versions that superimpose and therewith replace the actual memory.
So it's about bidirectional echoes: Those of the past, that influence us at present and get passed on to future generations, and those of the present, that echo back into the past through the unconscious activity of recoding memory narratives and thereby re-write our own identity history.
»Ramifications« is intended to illustrate the distortions and mechanisms that these echoes entail. How they give rise to spaces that we create ourselves but do not have under control.
This automated activity of creating worlds is to be contrasted here with a conscious observation by giving this process a space with a walk-in film installation. Surrounded by several screens, the visitors find themselves in the middle of a formation of trunks that rise up into the air, branching into each other at the top and weaving themselves across the space like a net. Fragmentary moving images appear on the screens, which place the audience in the position of filling the gaps. By entering an audience, a deformation occurs again, a new consolidation of causalities. This newly initiated process allows us to actively observe and experience it this time: A consciously induced, repeated foreign appropriation.
Project lead: Mandy Peterat, artistic lead, exhibition design
Project team:
- Mandy Peterat, artistic lead / director & exhibition design
- Samara Daouib, conceptionel co-author
- Adam Graf, cinematography
- Maximilian Pauly, creative producer (Monic Films)
- Valentin Mack & Niklas Harmsen, project management (Monic Films)
- Bertolt Pohl, music
Cooperation partners: Monic Films GmbH, Maximilian Pauly
Contact: Mandy Peterat, m.peterat(a)ymail.com