superimposition
with Leon Lechner, Margarete Kiss, Kirsten Plöhn, Tino Holzmann, touch don't touch, September - November 2022, parks hamburg
Superimposition took place in the summer and autumn of 2022 on the site of a former recycling yard in Hamburg — a place of transition, erasure, and latent memory. The project explored how histories inscribe themselves into urban space, how they overlap, fade, and reappear. It sought to imagine a collective, site-specific para-monument (after Nora Sternfeld): a fluid form of remembrance that resists the fixed logic of traditional monuments.
Through a series of gatherings — a film screening and two workshops — the site became a space for shared reflection and conversation.
The screening “Lagerhaus G” (with Markus Fiedler) traced the layered history of a Hamburg harbor building that once served as a warehouse, later as a site of forced labor, and today stands amid redevelopment and speculation. The discussion asked whether — and how — dignified remembrance is possible within such contested spaces.
The workshop “Time-Spaces” with Cornelia Chmiel examined how memory and identity are shaped by space. Through walking and dialogue, participants explored how histories inhabit our surroundings — and how places, in turn, remember us.
In a mini-workshop with Gisela Ewe from AK Hamburg Postkolonial, questions of postcolonial remembrance came to the fore: Who is visible in the city’s memory — and who remains unseen? Together, participants developed ideas for counter-memories and future monuments, both tangible and ephemeral.
Superimposition was less a project than a process — an invitation to move through the sediment of history, and to imagine new, collective forms of remembering.
Funded by Kunst im öffentlichen Raum, Hamburg Department of Culture, 2022
