Walking through walls is a „skill“ that is more familiar to us from computer games. As the title of Anna Witt’s project, it describes the situation of flight, a movement leading away from a threatening situation, often over borders, to a place assumed to be safe. This state of transit creates new life realities, mostly precarious, and becomes deeply engraved in the biographies of those who have taken flight. Individual experiences of flight provide the starting point for Walking Through Walls. In collaboration with a Syrian who fled to Saxony and a German who fled from the GDR, Witt searches for analogies between the present day and historic events. Her work brings different perceptions, lines of vision and attributions face to face with one another. In the first part of her project series, Witt lets each of the two protagonists tell the story of the other, in order to examine questions of representation and identification. Mass media images selected by the refugees are used symbolically to illustrate the reports.
This dialogue has been presented in different spatial situations and has been developed on site. During the course of the three-part project, it has grown continually as further narrative elements were added.
