Displacing Territories, 2021-2022

Multidisciplinary body of work – sound installation, sculpture, cyanotypes, painting, video.

Developed during the Fresh A.I.R. residency of the Berliner Leben Foundation; exhibited at Galleri Bülowstraße 90, Berlin, 2022

Displacing Territories was developed during a six-month residency at the FRESH A.I.R. programme in Berlin, where ten artists were invited to work around the theme of migration.

Rather than addressing migration through direct political representation, the project approaches displacement through changes of reference, scale and perception. If the point of reference is located within the moving body, it is no longer necessarily the body that appears to move: the surrounding territory itself can become mobile. This reversal structures several works in the project, where maps, landscapes, sounds and viewpoints are set into motion while the migrating figure remains absent or still.

A second line of enquiry considers migration through the physiology of migratory birds, particularly their need for rest, protection and temporary refuge. Their capacity to remain awake for prolonged periods, to sleep in fragmented ways and to depend on increasingly vulnerable resting sites opened a reflection on the effects of migration on the human body: exhaustion, stress, sleep and the need for safety.

Across sound, painting, cyanotype, mechanical movement and video, the project explores how territories continue to shift within memory and dreams. Places separated by distance and time overlap, merge and reappear within one another. Migration is therefore approached not only as a physical passage through space, but as an ongoing reconfiguration of the body, perception and lived territory.

Sleep, Ultimate Refuge, 2022

Sound installation based on interviews with 8 participants. Wooden and textile structure, birch trunks, cushions, pillow speakers, audio recordings and printed interview transcripts on clipboards. Variable dimensions.

Sleep, Ultimate Refuge is based on interviews with eight people who had migrated to Berlin, focusing on sleep, dreams, exhaustion and the need for protection. The conversations took place inside a temporary wooden and textile shelter designed both as an acoustic enclosure and as a space of safety.

The structure was later installed within a symbolic forest of birch trunks. The recorded voices were transmitted through pillow speakers concealed in cushions, making them audible only to spectators who entered the shelter and adopted a position of rest. Full transcripts of the interviews were displayed individually on clipboards, preserving the specificity of each account alongside the collective sound composition.

The work approaches refuge not only as a place, but as a fragile physical and psychological condition. In dreams, displaced territories and temporalities overlap, allowing distant places, past lives and present realities to coexist within the same space.

Installation and process views of Sleep, Ultimate Refuge.
Top left: individually displayed interview transcripts, one clipboard per participant. Centre and right: interviews conducted inside the temporary wooden and textile shelter. Lower images: the shelter reinstalled within a symbolic forest of birch trunks and activated as a listening space. The recorded voices were transmitted through pillow speakers concealed in cushions, requiring visitors to enter the structure and adopt a position of rest.

Photo © Benny Andersson

Exploring Nonexistant Places, 2022

Series of cyanotypes based on AI-generated images created from selected dream narratives collected during interviews with eight people who had migrated to Berlin. Cyanotype on paper, variable dimensions.

Exploring Nonexistent Places translates selected dream narratives from the interviews into images generated with an early AI system, then materialised as cyanotypes through exposure to sunlight. The process moves each account from spoken memory to text, synthetic image and photographic print.

The resulting places combine distant geographies, different periods of life and altered domestic spaces. Although geographically nonexistent, they give form to territories experienced through migration, where memory and present reality continue to reorganise one another.

Exploring Nonexistent Places, 2022. Six framed cyanotypes, 15 x 10 cm each. Photo © Victoria Tomaschko

Bird View, 2022

Oil on canvas, 300 × 450 cm.

Bird View presents an aerial view of the same landscape used in Sounds of Migration. Its large scale places the viewer inside the image while maintaining the distance of a view from above.

By shifting between immersion and overview, the painting destabilises the position from which territory is perceived. Unlike the skies in L’Essentiel, the ground remains visible, placing the work outside that protocol.

Bird View, 2022. Installation view at Galerie Bülowstraße 90, Berlin. Photo © Benny Andersson

Sounds of Migration, 2022

Modified componium and perforated paper map, variable dimensions.

Sounds of Migration transforms a north–south map of Sweden into a mechanical score. The perforations mark lakes used by migrating geese as resting places, producing sound as the paper passes through the componium.

The map can be played in either direction, reversing the journey and the resulting sound. While the birds remain fixed, the territory itself moves, shifting migration from the displacement of a body to the displacement of its environment.

Sounds of Migration, 2022. Installation view and detail of the componium with its perforated paper map. Photos © Victoria Tomaschko

Just Observing, 2022

Video montage based on photographs by Pierre Moullec. Single-channel video, sound, duration: 3 min.

Just Observing reorganises photographs by Pierre Moullec into a gradual progression from distant images of migratory birds to increasingly close physical contact. Without adding commentary, the sequence shifts the figure of the guide towards a more ambiguous position of control and intrusion.

By working only through selection and montage, the video examines the paternalism that can underlie representations of guidance, care and migration, while implicitly questioning the position of those who frame and represent the experience of others. All photographs are credited to Pierre Moullec in the end titles.

Just Observing, 2022. Video still and installation view. Presented on a small monitor positioned outside the immediate field of attention, the work functioned almost as a visual footnote within the exhibition. Photo © Victoria Tomaschko

Research relevance

Displacing Territories is central to my research because it transposes migration into spatial, perceptual and bodily conditions rather than representing it directly. Across the different works, territory becomes mobile, rest becomes a condition of access, dreams reorganise distant places, and guidance shifts towards control.

The project tests how social and political structures can be embedded in artistic processes, scales and positions of spectatorship. It also introduces an ethical dimension to this method: how to work with the experiences of others without reducing them to evidence, illustration or symbolic material.