Title: Meet the Memory Person

Collaborative project

Medium: participatory city walk, mementos
Year: 2023-24
Materials: multimedia
Duration: 3hs
Dimensions: variable

Photos ©Sandra Singh, Milena Wojhan

The Advertisement Person, portrait of Hans Held. From the photo collection Munich Originals by Karl Valentin, in the eponymous book by Karl Stankiewitz, Allitera Verlag, 2019, p. 242.

Souvenir Vendor, Oktoberfest, Munich, 1907/10. Photo: Philipp Kester. Source: Munich City Archive.

The Memory Person is a collector of memories: a figure and also a real role adapted by my fellow collaborators and myself during workshops and curated walks around several cities. The project was conceived in 2022 through an open call for public art to commemorate local cultural practitioners who were forced into exile during the Nazi regime in Munich. To link these historical events with the present, the project bridges past and current experiences of exile and migration in Munich and beyond.

The project critically engages with Karl Valentin’s photo collection Munich Originals (Münchner Originale). This collection features quirky local characters and creatives who lived outside bourgeois norms around the turn of the 20th century. A specific point of reference is the historical Advertisement Person (Reklamemensch) Hans Held: walking through his neighborhood, he invited passersby to pin various objects to his clothing. The Memory Person adopts this public interaction to fill an important gap. While Munich‘s traditional monuments rarely tell stories of exile and migration, this project transforms fleeting moments into a growing, community-created counter-monument.
In workshops, The Memory Person invites participants to come together and give expression to personal memories through the creative process. By gifting these pieces (mementos) to the project, participants turn them into public contributions. These are then presented online as an Open Archive, documented in an extensible catalog, and featured during curated city walks. The participatory tours also lead to sites whose histories of migration and exile are currently invisible within the cityscape, such as former forced labor camps.

Please click here for the full list of project participants, updates, and more info.

Performer City Walks Giesing, Munich: Franziska Windolf, Konouz Saeed, Lisavieta Bogushevskaya, Simone Kokou, Viviana Iacob

City walks Giesing, Munich: 1 June 2023, 3pm; 4 June 2023, 12am; 11 June 2023, 3pm; 13 June 2023, 4 pm; 19 June 2023, 5pm; 24 June 2023, 12am; 30 July 2024, 6pm; 10 August 2024, 3pm; 11 August 2024, 3pm; 12 August 2024, 6pm; 30 August 2024, 6pm; 31 August 2024, 3pm

Workshop participants Munich: Anick Messerschmitt, Eliza Kokeyan, Elvin Turgut, Emver Retzep Oglou, Franziska Windolf with quotes paraphrasing Adnan Al-Dhahir, Haydar Isik, Ivan Binar, Milorad Vujovic, Wladimir Nikolajewitsch Woinowitsch; Hanna Vasina, Iriet Yusuf, Iriet Yusuf and Giesing school children, Kathrin Knöpfle, Katja Kushnir, Ksenia Bykovsky, Leonid Hrytsak, Liana Chernetska, Maisoun Alfarawati, Manuel Friedrich, Mariam Monga, Mehmet “Schlosser”, Miriam Worek, Natalia Shynkarova, Nicolas Wannenmacher, Olena Mytko, Pepi, Ping-Pong group , Seb, Selin Julia Sissiyo, smadlmachts, Su Turhan, Viktoriia Ivasyshyna; some, who wish to be anonymous

Workshops Munich: 13 May 2023 @ Kulturzentrum Gorod, Munich; 12 November 2023 @ FLORIDA Lothringer 13, Munich; 15 June 2024, 22 June 2024, 29 June 2024, 6 July 2024 @ 103er Freizeitreff, Munich-Giesing; 27 September 2026 @ Bellevue di Monaco, Munich

Catalog Meet the Memory Person Part 1 (German / English), Klinger Verlag, Passau (DE) (ISBN 978-3-86328-198-4)Catalog Meet the Memory Person Part 2 (English), Klinger Verlag, Passau (DE)
static Vol. 3 No. 1, p.11 (2024)
gd:c newsletter (2024)
Open Archive online
Video documentation Giesing (2023). Please contact me for the password.

This project was developed within Franziska Windolf’s fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect and initiated by the ERC project Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (METROMOD) (2023). It received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (2023). Additional support was provided by BBK Munich and Upper Bavaria (2023), as well as the Department of Culture, the Migration Council, and District Committee 17 Obergiesing-Fasangarten of the city of Munich (all 2024).

© 2026 Franziska Windolf. All Rights Reserved

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