Open Conversations: Drawing the Memories of Exile (Stephan Zimmerli, Studiolo of Exile)

My name is Stefan Zimmerli and we are here in [music] this project called the Studiola of Exile. We are in the Einkeller, the basement of the Engel Nest place in Berlin Schöneberg. [music] We are part of the Funding the Commons Forum that is right now taking place above us and behind us. The idea is to build a space, a little architecture that you see here made of wood, that is at the same time a mental space. It is representing the inside of a brain.

And at the same time it is a studio where I work and I draw directly on the walls. All the drawings that you see on the walls, they are coming [music] directly from the memories of people who tell me memories from their childhood, [music] from their past. And they are all people with a history of exile or migration. So these visions, they are mental visions that they tell me and that I draw [music] live as they speak. I try to give a visual form to their words and to materialize their memories in front of their eyes.

With their help, it's an interactive process where they taking [music] part in the shaping of these memories as my hand is. They are the brain and I am the hand.

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And in the end we aim to create a sort of panoramic vision [music] where each memory seamlessly merges into the next one. We want to create a sort of panorama, a common horizon. It's just like if you take an There's an old song that hasn't been played for ages and then you want to recreate it. You cover it and you make a new version. You make it come alive again and then it's present.

It's creating emotions.

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It's also meaning something new in this context. And for somebody who has lost their country, I think the fact that we can [music] revive the mental place is very important because often these these persons have no chance to go back at the moment to these places or the places [music] themselves have been destroyed. So this idea that we could transmit very intimate memories that have autobiographical but also political meaning from one brain to the other with just a listening, talking, and a stick of charcoal and some plywood, that's for me an antidote. Archiving memory, for me it's an obsession. It's almost like something [music] that I didn't decide.

I just have to do it. But, I know the intuition is that it becomes [music] more important than ever to archive organic memories, the body memories, in [music] at the exact time when technological memory is really taking over a huge part of our lives. I believe this is a way to [music] resist, as I said, an antidote that we need to nurture, strengthen, [music] and maintain in order to just stay with our human memories alive.

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