Spuren durch Raum und Zeit (Traces Through Space and Time)
Some places carry a particular stillness, one in which something shines through. Perhaps they are traces of memories that cannot be grasped, yet linger in the air like the beat of a bird’s wings.
Birds come and go. Without food, without a call. They appear as if they know something that humans can only sense. They are there. Quiet. Unwavering. As if they carried a spirit within them. Perhaps not a specific one, but the principle of the in-between: between time and place, between life and death, between holding on and letting go.
Like memories, they appear from somewhere undefined, linger briefly, and then disappear again. Their movement resembles what happens within us when something suddenly touches us: a scent, a quote, a glance. Something that momentarily reminds us of what once was and has long since passed.
In some houses, this energy accumulates. Not only in objects, but also in gestures, routines, and unspoken questions. The attempt to create order where life overflows. The desire to preserve what is fleeting: in notes, in objects, in the records of other voices.
Not everyone keeps a diary, but some people write down what moves them. They do not collect out of a desire for possession, but out of inner resonance: because a sentence, an image, a moment reflects something within them that they themselves could not put into words.
In this way, collecting becomes the securing of traces. A chronicle of a mental landscape. Yet what has been collected remains fragmentary, like memory itself. Always in transition, never complete.
Perhaps the ordering of things is always also a form of translation: from chaos into structure, from overwhelm into form, from memory into signs.
The spaces that emerge resemble transitional zones. Places where inside and outside touch, where the past flickers through and the present becomes permeable. This is where Haus der Dinge begins.
It is a place for what does not fade, even though it has long since passed. A place for hovering between holding on and letting go.
A place where birds still know what humans have long forgotten.
Anette C. Halm
Haus der Dinge 