Memory Without Walls
A film about how imagination reshapes historical memory
Memory Without Walls is a hand-painted animated film inspired by real escape attempts across the Berlin Wall. Through thousands of painted frames, archival images dissolve into imagined crossings—balloons rising into the sky, swimmers moving through the canal, and a figure balancing on a wire stretched between two worlds.
The film explores how imagination allows us to move beyond barriers that once seemed immovable.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Memory Without Walls began with a question: what would I have done if I had lived in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall?
My honest answer was that I probably would have been too afraid to try to escape. Yet the more I researched, the more I became fascinated by the daring and imaginative ways people found to cross what seemed like an impossible barrier.
The film focuses on two remarkable stories. In 1979, the families of Peter Strelzyk and Günter Wetzel escaped East 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.
While working on the project, I was also in conversation with neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, whose research explores the relationship between memory and imagination. As she observes:
“Memory is like time travel to the past.
Imagination is travel not bound to any time.”
Inspired by this idea, I allowed the paintings to shift gradually from historical imagery into imagined crossings. Balloons multiply in the sky, swimmers appear along the border, and the wall itself begins to dissolve.
The work asks how imagination allows us to move beyond barriers—historical or internal—that once felt immovable.
FILM DETAILS
Memory Without Walls
Hand-painted animation
7 minutes
2022–2026
Originally commissioned for Art Week Berlin
ARTISTIC PROCESS
Memory Without Walls is composed of three paintings and a seven-minute projection of paintings in motion.
Working from archival photographs and historical footage, I created approximately 24,000 painted frames, later editing them to about 15,000 images, animated at 30 frames per second.
The visual process mirrors the meaning of the film. Images begin as recognizable historical scenes and gradually drip, layer, and dissolve into imaginative transformations—a metaphor for the way memory and imagination merge inside us.
CURATORIAL DESCRIPTION
Memory Without Walls explores how historical events persist not only as documented facts but as evolving images in cultural memory.
Drawing on archival photographs of escape attempts during the decades when Berlin was divided, the work transforms documentary material into hand-painted animation in which the boundary between memory and imagination dissolves.
As the film unfolds, the Berlin Wall shifts from a rigid barrier into a landscape of crossings—balloons rising into the sky, swimmers and climbers moving through the border, and a figure balancing on a wire stretched between two worlds.
Created from thousands of painted frames, the film situates historical memory within a fluid visual language where past events are continually reimagined.