Resurfacing

Eighty years after World War II, its traces and consequences still surround us. While some memories of war are still accessible to us today, most of them – like the ammunition buried in the sea – remain hidden.

Dwelling on the analogy of the subaquatic and the subconscious, I connect my grandfather’s personal account of the wartime with the collective memories embodied through memorial sites and traces of the war. Starting from these insights into the past I want to understand how the war trauma continues to affect society. In my work I combine recounts from family members and speculation to create an archive of reconstructed memory. In doing so, my gaze turns outwards and inwards at the same time, using my own and my family’s dealing with memory to make sense of how it’s kept, left forgotten and passed on to the next generation.