With Memory of the City, artist/filmmaker Sascha Pohflepp created a 'small and cheap' intervention in the public spaces of Berlin, Germany as a tool for resurrecting awareness about people and events of the past.

Pohflepp's project maps the pervasive, politically-driven agenda of renaming Berlin streets and squares after prominent people or historical events. Tracing a time trajectory of 180 years, Pohflepp shows how each new regime removed icons of its predecessor in an attempt to erase them from memory in the public sphere. His project literally re-writes those names back into the landscape as graphic inscriptions that fan out like shadows on the sidewalk surrounding the street signposts. The shadows are cast in a 180 degree arc that is directly correlated to historical time. This 'urban echo' creates a tangible, real-time memory-space that connects current inhabitants to those who came before them.

Later, an approach for digital media was developed that creates a 3-dimensional, 'panoramic' map of the city. In this iteration of the project, contextual information about the street names in Berlin spreads out along x, y and z axes as a visible spectrum of time and political party lines.

Whether accessed in real-time or virtually, Memory of the City touches on important issues of historical memory, while reminding us of the fragile nature of our temporal existence, as well as of the political economies by which we are bound.

Sascha Pohflepp projects >