Ash almost falls like snow. I stick out my tongue and catch a flake from my childhood. To my surprise, it tastes bitter. The earth beneath me is dry and hot. In 2021, large parts of the Greek island of Evia burned in uncontrolled forest fires. The multi-media installation Asche fällt fast wie Schnee processes traces of these fires through material, visual, and sonic means. Using ash and coal from Evia, the artist prints structures that evoke charred trees, cracked earth, and wrinkled skin. Sound design transforms the apocalyptic scenes into a sensual, subjective experience, emphasizing perception over documentation. The work emerges from lived experience and functions as a material manifestation of memory. Ash and coal act not merely as residues but as indexical traces that carry both personal and collective recollection. In this way, the installation embodies mnemonic materiality and recollection is understood as performative, sensory, and situated in matter and space. Environmental debris becomes both witness and participant, collapsing temporal distance between event and aftermath, allowing trauma to persist physically, perceptually, and affectively. Asche fällt fast wie Schnee thus negotiates the tension between individual experience and collective ecological grief, transforming fire’s destructive traces into carriers of remembrance and reflection.

Exhibited at shifting realities Group Exhibition, Garage Grande, Vienna Austria.
Curated and Organized by Highbrow Institute and Zoe Köbrunner.
Part of shifting realities - sonic imagination (funded by Kreativfonds of Bauhaus Universität Weimar).