Marta is a platform for memories that had nowhere else to go. For voices that said: “An archive – that’s too much for us. But we’ll tell you.” I listened to many of these voices. In interviews. In conversations on the street. In unplanned encounters. Some were written to me. Some sent. Some simply appeared. From all these fragmented, vulnerable, hesitant, and powerful stories, Marta was born. Marta is not a real person. But she is made entirely of real stories. I placed AI-generated banners of working women in public space – to fill a gap: the absence of images of women in industrial labor, especially in the paper industry. And suddenly, people started sending me their real photos. Their memories. Their truths. This trust was never expected. It was a gift.
Marta exists for these voices. For those who say: Not the archive, but maybe this way. Together with others, I created handmade paper – from water, with many hands. That became the collective paper on which Marta now appears. Her face is projected onto it. And with her: a network. A network of stories, of relations, of memory. Visualized through Gephi. A mapped biography. A digital echo of what was shared with me. Marta is the vessel. The story. The question. The voice made of many. And she says: This, too, is a way to remember.
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I made a digital print on collective handmade paper – the MARTA network becomes visible.
A platform for people from Aschaffenburg who wanted to tell their stories, but not under their own names. Memories that do not claim absolute truth, but their own reality:
of work and hunger, of war and childhood, of the English, Americans, French,
of Hitler and West Germany. MARTA was fed with what often disappears: fragmentary, quiet, personal. Now it is visible – networked on paper. The paper itself was made by people from Aschaffenburg – in a collective process, analogue, with hands, water, fibres. I collected it, connected it and printed it with the digital network. The visualisations were created with Gephi, a programme for representing complex networks of relationships. Digital traces on collective matter – stories that hold each other together. Digital, analogue, collective. A loop.
