Lost and Found: a walking and making practice with Artist Bryn McConnell

Kreuzberg emerged as a working-class neighbourhood in the second half of the eighteenth century, along the banks of the Spree, a hub for the transport of raw materials, immediately populated by those arriving in search of work. After the IIWW, it became a destination for Gastarbeiter, workers whom the German state imagined as temporary. They were housed in buildings planned for demolition, in a district that the Wall had pushed to the physical margins of the city. But who decides where life, generations, and memory can take root?

Kreuzberg is a place that constantly asks what it means to inhabit a space, to leave a trace, to feel, even if only temporarily, at home, and to fight to remain where something meaningful is being built.

It is in this context that the work of artist Bryn McConnell, who moved from the USA to Berlin for her residency at GlogauAIR, takes shape. Her practice explores how personal and collective memory can be transformed into material through methods of repetition, weaving, and careful accumulation. Her current exhibition, Lost and Found, at Pandora Gallery, maps her urban explorations: walks, conversations, collected objects, and stories heard, translated into installations that reveal the often invisible patterns of belonging and movement across the city.

The shared day, part of the Public Programme of the current exhibition, extends her practice into a collective one. Understanding walking as an artistic method—a practice rooted in the dérive of the Situationists, echoed in the site-specific explorations of the late 1960s and 70s, and carried forward in contemporary community mapping—participants are invited to move together through Kreuzberg as carriers of memories, stories, and knowledge to share.

The walk begins with a studio visit to her current solo exhibition at Pandora Gallery on Mehringdamm, one of Europe's oldest shopping streets, which has changed its name several times throughout history in line with the city's political changes. Passing through the neighbourhood, we will arrive at GlogauAIR on Glogauer Straße, a building designed in 1896 by architect Ludwig Hoffmann as a public school and now used as a residence for artists. The artist will open up her practice to us, demonstrating how materials are worked, how the repeated gesture of weaving accumulates into structure. Together, we will create small fragments, complete or incomplete, which will become part of a collective work.

Walking from one point to another allows participants to pass through overlapping layers of time, intertwining their own stories into a fabric woven from the stories of others. What happens when bodies with different histories occupy the same space? What does a newcomer notice that a long-term resident no longer sees? And what do the objects we choose to collect, or leave behind, tell us?

Curated by Silvia Russo

Info: Studio Visit\ Meeting point at Pandora Gallery: walking practice ---

Our Sunday will begin with a studio visit to the Pandora Gallery, where the artist will explain her practice and research during her residency, with a focus on her explorations in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood.
A soft walk in the neighbourhood will follow and will make our slow morning. The route is not predetermined, but the focus will be on the patterns on the ground and surfaces, abandoned objects, signs of historical stratification, and the boundaries between public and private space.
What do we collect, physically or with our eyes?

Bring notebooks, recorders, and anything else you think you might need to take notes or have with you along the way. The walk is designed as a space for mutual listening, for the memories each participant brings and those suggested by the neighbourhood itself.

Info: Snacks Break\ Relational Handmaking at GlogauAIR Art Residency ---
In the second part of the day, we arrive at our destination, GlogauAIR, where the artist has her studio, bringing with us what the morning has given us: objects, impressions, photographs, conversations, and fragments.
We work together to build small collective structures, weaving found and provided materials through the techniques of Bryn's practice: weaving, sewing, and assembling. Each fragment, complete or incomplete, carries the trace of the day, of the walk, of what each of us chose to collect or remember. At the end, our individual perceptions converge into a single shared form, a work in which every participant is recognised as a co-author.

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Host or Publisher Silvia Russo