Research
Language and Social Belonging
How are memories passed on? What part is played by a family’s languages, its names and the things it preserves?
As a linguist with a PhD, I study multilingualism, family language policy and cultural belonging. My research and artistic practice share a concern with what is passed on between generations – and what escapes transmission.
Language and Social Belonging
My project examines the relationship between language, origins and inherited objects. Works of art and everyday family possessions may preserve traces of former owners: in names, dedications, inscriptions on their reverse and oral accounts, as well as in inventories and catalogue descriptions.
I am particularly interested in the passage from a family setting into another collection. Which memories remain attached to a work? How does the account of its origins change when its surroundings and the language used to describe it change?
Family Symbols and Archival Traces
Family names, visual symbols and old written records provide a starting point for my research.
I read these materials alongside family stories and the journeys of individual objects. I am also interested in gaps and shifts: what is named, what remains implicit and what is read differently later.
Language and Access to Memory
Objects and written records may survive even when a family’s language is not passed on to the next generation. Names, inscriptions and inherited expressions can then become unfamiliar. I explore which memories become harder to access and what can be rediscovered through the traces that remain.
Memory Across Generations
Alongside this research, an artistic project is taking shape under the working title Was bleibt (What Remains), bringing together inherited objects and archival fragments. Painting and research meet in the gaps: where something survives, but its story can only partly be told.