Our past is a foreign country

CAB's practice explores memory, identity and inherited archives.

This series of photographs and mixed-media collages is an ongoing visual study concerned with memory, the body, identity, and inherited archives. The project examines how personal and collective histories are shaped by silence, tradition, and transgenerational imprinting, and how photography can function as a material and performative process for engaging with burdened histories.

The work is rooted in a family archive from Bavaria dating from the 1930s to the 1950s, which is reactivated through photographic reconstruction, performance, and material intervention. Rather than treating the archive as a fixed document, the project approaches it as a fragile and contradictory body of material that requires continual negotiation. Bodies, objects, and spaces operate as carriers of memory and as sites of projection.

In mid-2020, following years of travel, Caroline Alena Bergwinkl returned to her Bavarian hometown due to the Covid-19 lockdown. In her family home, she came across a box of personal artifacts: her grandmother’s poetry album from 1933, her grandfather’s wartime photo album, his police training documents, as well as old Bavarian police caps and boots. This discovery made visible the absence of dialogue within her family around the past—a history she had learned about in school but had never connected to her own lineage.

The photographic engagement with this archive began in mid-2024 as part of a Master’s degree in Fine Art. Bergwinkl’s twin sister, Stephanie, frequently appears in front of the camera, performing acts of appropriation of the archival material. This displacement allows for both proximity and distance, framing identity as something relational, performative, and unresolved.

The project centers the perspective of German descendants and understands photography as a means of articulating shame, anger, and ambivalence toward one’s own family archive without seeking resolution. Through the reconstruction of artifacts—such as her grandparents’ apartment—or symbolic references like the White Rose, history is not illustrated but experienced as something deeply personal and embodied. The work constitutes an attempt to locate a position within a burdened past and to remain accountable to it without withdrawing.