Walking through walls is a project about the experience of being a refugee. It was developed in close collaboration with Ashraf Jabal, a young Syrian man who escaped in 2014 from Damascus to Leipzig, and Alexa Dreesmann, a German who escaped in 1989 from the former GDR to West Germany. The project was developed as an ongoing process over the period of a whole year. Based on these two personal experiences of the protagonists, different perceptions towards refugees within society where developed into a multi-media installation.
The first part of this project presents the first encounter of the two protagonists, where each one of them tells the other the stories of their escape in a matter-of-fact manner. They alternate the retelling of these stories so that the individual experiences of the different timelines increasingly blur for the observer. What follows are partial reenactments, discussions and personal notes which help the protagonists work through the experiences, some of which lie further in the past than others, with special regard to questions of authorship and the influence of the media.
Through the course of this project both parties experienced not only the intensity of confiding in each other, but also shifts within complex levels of meaning. The current political awareness of refugees is complemented by a profound need to work through German historical events.