Underwood Memory

4K video, sound (stereo), Ukrainian, Turkish, Korean, Arabic, Vietnamese, Spanish, German with English and German subtitles, 17:30 min., 2026
In collaboration with Setareh Shahbazi, SHIN Hyo Jin, and Otto Oscar Hernández Ruiz
Director of photography: Danny Tatzelt
Sound design: Nicholas Bussmann

Underwood Memory (Unterholzgedächtnis in German) constructs a speculative future scenario that looks back on a buried past: in the former border zone of Frohnau Forest, Berlin appears as a vanished city. A group of researchers takes soil samples and investigates the terrain through sound, movement, and voice. At the heart of the work is the question of what becomes sedimented in the historical layers of a society: transmitted knowledge and experiences of belonging, exclusion, and racist violence. The researchers follow traces that elude conventional archives.

Interspersed throughout are appearances by dancers from the MuAK Ensemble, comprising Korean women who came to Germany as recruited migrant workers and their descendants. At the end, Otto Oscar Hernández Ruiz sings a song whose lyrics were written in the 1930s by the Jewish Austrian writer Fritz Löhner-Beda, who was murdered at the Auschwitz III-Monowitz concentration camp in 1942. The song is a musical quotation from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (1974), which addresses the experiences of racism faced by a Moroccan migrant worker in West Germany.

Commissioned by Gropiusbau Berlin on the occcasion of the exhibition “Kreuzberg: Art and Migration since 1960”.