I was inspired to make this artwork in response to Brunhilde Hofacker's experience of migration from Czechoslovakia to East Germany. Migratory Landscapes is like an ocean drum, filled with approximately 30,000 wild garlic seeds. These seeds represent the 3 million ethnic Germans who were forced to leave the Sudetenland after World War II. Twelve of these seeds are colored blue to represent Brunhilde, her parents, and her nine siblings.

The frame can be tilted and shaken by the viewer to create new alignments, new borders, new patterns of migration. This artwork suggests that borders and landscapes are not fixed entities but instead are human inventions. The oil painting on the back of the frame has been covered by paper made from banana trees. This paper obscures the known colors of the past and reduces the present view to merely straw.

Special thanks to Brunhilde Hofacker for sharing her migration stories with me and to ExpoTransKultur for entrusting me with this commission as part of the project Found in Translation 2023.

You can listen to Bruni’s migration story here.