Beneath the Surface: Memory, Architecture, and History’s Aftermaths

Presentation and discussion with Hadas Tapouchi and Yael Almog

How do cities preserve and conceal traces of past violence? For over a decade, artist Hadas Tapouchi has explored the relationship between urban space, architecture, and memory. Combining photography, archival research, and public engagement, her new book Memory Practice (Distanz 2026) documents sites of Nazi persecution and forced labor that have been absorbed into everyday urban life. Former industrial facilities, administrative buildings, and sites of surveillance in Berlin and across Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe now function as schools, restaurants, offices, cinemas, and residential buildings. Their histories are no longer noticeable in the contemporary cityscape.

Memory Practice—including essays by Hadas Tapouchi and Yael Almog—is also a reflection on photography as a form of historical inquiry and on the challenges of engaging the residues of traumatic histories. Through a restrained photographic approach, it examines the tension between historical significance and apparent normality. Which traces of violence persist in the present, and which disappear from collective memory? How do processes of normalization shape the ways societies relate to their pasts?

The evening will feature a presentation of Memory Practice followed by a conversation between Hadas Tapouchi and Yael Almog and a discussion with the public. Moderation: Dirk Naguschewski (ZfL)

Hadas Tapouchi lives and works in Berlin. Her artistic practice combines photography, video, and research-based methodologies to explore the transformation of space and the ways architecture and landscape function as repositories of knowledge. Her work has been exhibited internationally and engages with questions of memory, displacement, and the politics of the built environment.

Yael Almog is an Associate Professor of German at Durham University. She is the author of Secularism and Hermeneutics (University of Pennsylvania Press 2019). Her recent work has appeared in Modern Intellectual History, German Life and Letters, and the German Studies Review, where her article won the German Studies Association’s Best Article Prize in 2023. She edited six volumes, including the special issue “Ages of Jewish Diaspora” (Political Theology 2025).

Abb. oben: © Hadas Tapouchi