"After the fall of the Wall, the city changed. During her daily strolls at dawn and dusk, when she felt that nobody looked, she caressed the poles of street-lamps, railings of benches, playground swings, corners of buildings, traffic light-stands..." Iris Häussler
Upon entering the flat in Berlin, visitors were immersed into a domestic scene disrupted, as if converted into a workshop focused on a single minded activity... and then, seemingly, abandoned.
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The apartment resembled an overflowing laundry storage. Thousands of fabric rags were stacked in big orderly piles. Each rag had a tag pinned to it. The tag was a copy of an entry in a ledger book noting what the rag had been used for such as cleaning a lamp pole, park bench, hand rail, writing down the street and the date of that stroll. Whatever the collector had chosen to give attention to her strolls, she touched it with the rags, …over time creating a private archive of dust and dirt in her small attic apartment in Berlin Mitte.
Both apartments had one single item in common: an old graduation photograph from a girls school. There is no indication of which school, city or year it was taken. But from the style of clothing it would appear to be from the 1950’s. We are left to wonder: though 600 kilometers apart, that at some point, many years ago, might these two women have a shared biography? Were they in contact with each other? Or rather: did they lose contact many years ago? Were they “the twins' identifiable on the graduation-photograph? What motivation may be behind their activities? What do we not see? Not know?