BEARING

BEARING (Berlin) (2025) is a site-specific, interactive video and sound installation that reads Berlin less as a geographic location than as a temporal field. Moving through the city’s waterways, architectures, and reflective surfaces, the work positions Berlin as an environment where multiple durations overlap: geological, botanical, historical, technological, and personal.

The video begins at the Neue Nationalgalerie and follows the River Spree to its confluence with the Havel, concluding beneath Dicke Marie—a tree presumed to be more than a thousand years old. As a being older than the city itself, the tree functions as a material anchor point: a living witness that exceeds human memory, political change, and the city’s reconstructed image of itself. In this encounter, the linearity of time loosens. Berlin is not presented as a sequence of events, but as an entanglement of pasts and speculative futures carried simultaneously in the urban landscape.

Throughout the film, surfaces behave as temporal mirrors. Water, glass, and stone hold transient inscriptions of the city, while a fog-like presence periodically obscures and consumes the image. Instead of cinematic continuity, the installation offers intervals: moments in which the viewer occupies a space of suspension, neither entirely present nor outside of time. In these interruptions, text surfaces—statements contributed by visitors in response to a sculptural work situated beside the screen.

The sculpture belongs to Nymann’s ongoing series Hippocampus Hippocampi, which explores the hippocampus as both biological organ and conceptual figure. The hippocampus is the site where long-term memory consolidates, where spatial orientation is formed, and where mental time travel becomes possible. In the installation, this brain structure becomes a physical interface. A QR code engraved on its surface invites visitors to answer the question:
“What do you remember that you want the future to remember?”

This prompt leads to an interactive platform, Carte de ContinuOnus, in which memories are deposited and marked with emotional coordinates. More than 3,000 entries now form an expanding database. Crucially, these contributions do not remain external to the artwork; they are absorbed into the video itself. Each new memory enters the moving image as a brief apparition—sentences drifting across the screen like signals from another time. Thus, the installation is never fixed. It is continuously rewritten by those who encounter it.

In this sense, BEARING resists closure. It operates as a living archive whose authorship is distributed and porous. The work’s structure acknowledges that memory is not static, and that the future is not a blank field awaiting inscription but something shaped by collective acts of remembering. By folding image, sound, text, and viewer participation into a single temporal loop, the installation proposes a different understanding of duration: one in which time is not a line, but a confluence—of human and nonhuman histories, fragile traces and speculative inheritances.

As BEARING travels to new cities and contexts, it continues to gather voices, emotions, and futures. What emerges is not only a portrait of Berlin, but a shifting cartography of memory itself: an archive of those who were here, those who are here now, and those yet to come