Commissioned for Art Week Berlin, Memory Without Walls began with a question: what would I have done if I had been trapped in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall? I imagined that I would have been too afraid to make a move. Yet the more I researched, the more I became fascinated by the daring and imaginative ways people found to escape.
This work focuses on two extraordinary stories. In 1979, Hans Strelczyk and Gunter Wetzel, along with their wives and children, crossed into West Germany in a homemade hot air balloon. Years earlier, in 1963, East German acrobat Horst Klein transformed an unused high-tension cable into a “tightrope” and walked across it to freedom.
In conversations with neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, PhD, I explored how memory and imagination intertwine. As she observes:
“Memory is like time travel to the past. Imagination is like travel not bound to any time.”
For people suffering from PTSD, imagination often shuts down, leaving traumatic memories “stuck.” I wanted this work to tap into the very human capacity to imagine a way past the seemingly impenetrable. Just as the balloonists floated above and the acrobat balanced across, they transcended the weight of the wall not by attacking it, but by imagining an alternate path.
We all have inner walls—moments where we feel stuck, constrained, unable to move forward. Imagination gives us the lightness to cross those obstacles, transforming trauma into possibility.
Artistic Process
Memory Without Walls is comprised of three paintings, a 7-minute projection of paintings in motion, and a series of moving-painting NFTs. Using archival photographs and footage as a point of departure, I created 24,000 painting stills, ultimately editing down to about 15,000, which were animated at 30 fps.
The method mirrors the meaning: images begin as “realistic” and then drip, layer, and dissolve into imaginative transformations—a metaphor for how memory and imagination merge inside us.
Memory Without Walls premiered as part of Art Week Berlin and continues to explore how the weight of memory can be reimagined through the lightness of creativity.