STAIRS

These gouache works on paper, based on blueprints that document staircases in the houses of displaced people, are being developed into a series of murals for the exterior walls of buildings in Berlin and the United States.


Murals will be painted in identical pairs: one in Germany, one in the city to which an exile fled. For example, a mural showing the stairs of Walter Gropius’ Berlin home could be painted in Cambridge Massachusetts where he taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.


The project’s aim, inspired by the powerful, moving memorials integrated into Berlin’s city fabric, like Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine and Christian Boltanski’s Missing House, is to join their subtly haunting conversation on memory and loss, and extend it beyond Germany.