A Walk down Memory Lane

installation
Memory Lane

A Walk down Memory Lane

In the video, I revisit the streets of the cities I have lived in with Google Street View forming one single route while narrating about this experience. The accompanying map represents my personal, psychogeographical landscape: Pieces of the different cities I lived in are patched together.

“What if we were able to take a walk through all the streets that we’ve lived in, connecting different countries, cities, neighborhoods and the corresponding periods of our lives with our steps? Forming one single route? It would be a biographical landscape shaped by one’s own memory. A personal, psychogeographical map in which all the pathways and territories are accessible and linked to each other by the meaning we attribute to them.”

  • Location: Kunstmuseum Bonn
  • Show: The Flaneur: From Impressionism to the Present
  • Year: 2018

The Woman of the Crowd

site-specific audio-walk
The Woman of the Crowd

The Woman of the Crowd

This site-specific audio-walk was developed for the exhibition “The Flaneur: From Impressionism to the Present” at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. Taking Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” as a starting point, it examines the topic of flanerie and presents four alternative characters from fine art and literature as female flaneuses. While listening to their stories, the participant is led through the area surrounding the museum.

“When we think of the woman in the crowd, walking among other people, does she ever turn around and look back? Suddenly having distinct features, a personality, an identity? What if she, in turn, was the flaneur, or rather the flaneuse? One that is not relegated to the periphery? One that has her own way, her own wishes and desires? Is it even possible to think of a figure that transcends this binary opposition of established gender norms?”

  • Listen:
  • Location: Kunstmuseum Bonn
  • Show: The Flaneur: From Impressionism to the Present
  • Year: 2018

present views of past streets

experimental video with binaural recording

present views of past streets - Stockholm

Expanded video work that deals with the subjective experience of walking through an urban space that you've never physically been to.

As I did in Sardinia, I recorded a tour in Google Street View while still in Cologne, Germany - and without ever having been to Stockholm. As a sound layer, my own voice was recorded, commenting sensations, observations and the sounds that I would imagine to experience while walking through the actual neighbourhood.

During a short residency in Stockholm, I proceeded to take the exact same tour as I had virtually, and record the sound with in-ear-microphones, capturing the spatial atmosphere. In the last step, the recording was added to the video, merging different layers of time and space as well.

  • Location: Rethinking Flanerie, Marabouparken Stockholm
  • Year: 2016

Lusco-Fusco

video

Lusco-Fusco

Lusco-Fusco is a video-installation that addresses the subjects of night and darkness, sleeplessness, dream and memory, as well as bi-nationality and migration.
Autobiographical narration is mixed with short excerpts from a novel by Clarice Lispector and a popular children’s song by Vinícius de Moraes.

  • Location: W139, Amsterdam
  • Year: 2015

Gone Astray

locative audio-walk
Image by Jana Nowak

Gone Astray

This audio-walk is an attempt to learn about the urban space through the eyes of a profoundly different being. The tour takes a closer look at cats living on the streets of Jaffa and at human/animal relationships.

The audio-walk was developed during a residency at Artport Tel Aviv in Israel.

  • Listen: Gone Astray
  • Collaborating Artist: Sonya Schönberger
  • Location:Tel-Aviv Jaffa, Israel
  • Show:B_Tour Foothold Festival Tel-Aviv, Jaffa, Lod
  • Year: 2017

The Voice

audio-walk
The Voice

The Voice

This audio-walk takes the audience on an intimate journey with Lod based singer, Rudi Bainesay, while she shares her thoughts on her career as a musician and its relation to her Ethiopian background.

The audio-walk was developed during a residency at Artport Tel Aviv in Israel.

  • Listen:
  • Location: Lod, Israel
  • Show: B_Tour Foothold Festival Tel-Aviv, Jaffa, Lod
  • Year: 2017

The Strange Half-Absence of Wandering at Night

Image by Jana Nowak

The Strange Half-Absence of Wandering at Night

In this audio-walk, participants accompany a female protagonist through a park area at dusk. She embodies the spirit of fictional and real women who claimed their freedom to wander, thus challenging the restrictions and conventions of their culture and time. The audio piece mixes narrative, text excerpts, music and field recordings. The sun sets while the participant walks, bringing out other qualities of this environment.

“Refusing to be the object of anyone’s gaze, she decides to walk into the park at the fall of night. Directly within the city, yet isolated from its busy streets. She enters this space with the intention of becoming completely invisible, merging with the surroundings in a strange half-absence of the body.”

still here, sometimes there

remote audio-walk
still here, sometimes there

still here, sometimes there

This remote audio-walk was carried out simultaneously by 40 women living as migrants in 21 cities within 13 countries, which were contacted via social media. The audio comprised stories and reflections on the subject of home and homelessness, childhood and growing up in different countries. At the same time, the participants received instructions on how to walk and what to photograph, including a map of the path they had walked. The digital images were sent to the artist directly afterwards, while the drawings of the maps were posted, creating the only analogue trace of the activity.
Image above by Alba Baez Martinez

  • Listen:
  • Shown at: Jung Art Berlin 2011, Rethinking Flanerie 2016
  • Year: 2011

Parlor Talk Berlin

audio-performance
Parlor Talk Berlin

Parlor Talk - Berlin

This audio-manicure-performance was first produced and shown 2014 in a gallery space in Kreuzberg, Berlin. For the audio piece, the artist interviewed two Brazilian manicurists living and working in Berlin. Being a half-Brazilian and having lived in Brazil and Berlin, the artist confronts herself and the audience with questions regarding migration and class, work and belonging. In order to listen to the audio piece, each participant had to receive a manicure done by the artist on site and vice versa: if interested in receiving a manicure, the participant would have to listen to the audio piece.
Image above by Patricia Breves Correa da Costa

  • Listen:
  • Location: Blockbuster Exhibitions, Berlin
  • Show: 7:1 Brazilian Artists in Berlin
  • Year: 2014

Parlor Talk Bangalore

audio-performance
Parlor Talk Bangalore

Parlor Talk - Bangalore

As foreigners, immigrants, urban nomads and women, how do we negotiate personal space and how is this influenced by the circumstances we live in? In an attempt to create an approximation to these questions and to the participants, a situation was dislocated and recreated from a place regarded as a typically feminine domain in India (and other countries): the beauty parlor.

The title is a reference to both the conversations that form the basis of the audio work, as well as to the performance that was enacted during the exhibition at 1Shanthi Road gallery, in which individual participants received a manicure from the artist.


The performance and accompanying audio work "parlor talk" were developed during the bangaloREsidency in Bangalore, India.

  • Listen:
  • Location: 1Shanthi Road Gallery, Bangalore
  • Show: two art inhibitions (with Claudia Reiche)
  • Year: 2014

Of One's Own

lecture performance
Of One's Own

Of One's Own

The work is based on Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room Of One’s Own”. During the performance, fragments of different texts addressing questions of personal space are used and projected in space through both a live performance and a pre-recorded audio file that each person in the audience is listening to over headphones. Both parts (live and recorded) are synchronized with each other and switch back and forth seamlessly, therefore creating an analogy to the topic addressed: how headphones can create a personal, immaterial space.

  • Location: Quartier am Hafen, Cologne
  • Show: Floating Gestures
  • Year: 2013

present views of past streets

experimental video with binaural recording

present views of past streets - San Sperate, Sardinia

Expanded video work that deals with the subjective experience of walking through an urban space that you've never physically been to.

I recorded a tour of San Sperate, Sardinia, in Google Street View while still in Cologne, Germany - and without ever having been to Italy or Sardinia. As a sound layer, my own voice was recorded, commenting sensations, observations and the sounds that I would imagine to experience while walking through the actual village.

During a workshop in San Sperate, I proceeded to take the exact same tour as I had virtually, and record the sound with in-ear-microphones, capturing the spatial atmosphere. In the last step, the recording was added to the video, merging different layers of time and space as well.

Lives and works in Cologne, Germany
The German-Brazilian media artist was born in Quito, Ecuador and grew up in various countries across Europe, Asia and Latin America, a fact that has greatly influenced her work.

She holds a bachelor’s degree from PUC-Rio de Janeiro in Visual Communication (2005), a diploma from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (2009) and a Ph.D. from the Bauhaus-University Weimar’s Media Arts department (2019). Johanna has been a lecturer at different universities since 2015 including the University of Cologne and the University of Siegen.

In Germany since 2006, she has been working with participative performances, audio, photography and video. Often using narrative and mobile strategies, her work deals with the subject of migration, nomadism, gender and walking.

Regardless of the media and format used, the focus lies on the cooperation with individuals and groups, which are involved in the artistic process to different degrees. Performative works originate precisely in this exchange - that often occurs in trans- or intercultural environments - and are conceptualized, developed and ultimately received on the move.

While work and migration play a special role in Johanna's projects, her focus lies on the subject of space: from a feminist point of view, her works deal with both the construction of private spaces and the individual's position in public space. These are always embodied positions that are especially activated by walking - as a form of exploration and appropriation of space.