“A poetic disruption” – filling blank spaces with collective storytelling
The Alternative Memorial for Germany (Alternatives Denkmal für Deutschland, ADfD) is an augmented reality monument that seeks to connect migration experiences and public memory culture. eCommemoration’s Anna Norpoth spoke to ADfD’s creators Mikala Hyldig Dal, Siska and Emanuele Valariano, about collecting and sharing stories and filling the blank spots of German memory culture.

When and how did you notice that there are some blank spots in memory culture?
Mikala: If you are a little bit concerned with history and you are also engaged with public space, you realise that many people commemorated often have links to colonialism. And the many stories that are important now, particularly in today’s political situation in Germany, migrant’s stories, are simply absent. This was an important reason to start the project as we want to engage with the public space and create space for voices that are not present.
Siska: I recently looked into the term memory hole—a mechanism for deliberately altering or erasing inconvenient or embarrassing records, whether documents, photos, transcripts, or archives, often to create the illusion that something never happened. The concept was first popularized by George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is what I want to emphasize: growing up during civil war, I constantly had to erase and curate my own memories, keeping only what felt bearable. As a child, I learned early that memory holes weren’t just an idea—they were real. They surrounded me, and I had to figure out how to fill them.
Emanuele: Memory culture as it is done in Germany, in Europe in general or in Western countries, is very dogmatic. It’s very fixed to specific narrations and it doesn’t open up to the multi-layered and multi-faceted perspectives of history. It forgets a lot, and many things are forgotten in order to respect predetermined systems of narration. And especially for migration in Germany, this is very clear. We see it on a daily basis with what kind of news are being published, what kind of narratives are being produced about migrant people, in order to build up a typical cliché. And this is something I really like: that we have built a monument, which is multi-layered and multi-faceted, and which allows many narrations.
When you decided to fill memory holes or blank spaces – why did you do that with a monument and specifically with an AR monument?
Mikala: I’ve been very interested in augmented reality for quite some years now. And my interest arises from the tension between the tactile urban space, the reality that we all immediately can perceive, and the hidden potential which is there. Often my approach is: how can we open the urban landscape to the dormant potential which lies in there? I think that the digital format is strong in bringing together different modes of expression, and the specific augmented reality format is very strong, because it fuses the present with the potential future. I see this in some ways as a utopian space. But the beauty of it is a utopian space that you can experience, that you can access, that you can enter. Augmented reality has such a power in comparison with virtual reality for instance. Because in virtual reality you are enclosed in this digital world, but augmented reality, if you use it spatially, which is not so common, but the way we use it, is very rooted in the real, in the present, in the urban space that we share.
Siska: I see it as a latent digital environment embedded in urban space—one that intertwines collective remembrance, culture, and voices from diverse backgrounds. What truly intrigues me is its political weight and the public discourse it generates. On one side, there’s the digital element—reaching beyond physical boundaries—but on the other, there’s the discourse element, the conversations it sparks. And looking at what’s unfolding in Germany and across Europe today, it’s impossible to ignore the urgency. It’s alarming. This monument isn’t just a statement; it’s a reaction. A way to push back. By harnessing the digital, we expand access, engage more people, and build a parallel discourse that challenges what’s happening in real-time.
Mikala: It’s also a kind of guerrilla activism. We put the monument up and experience it together, which is a kind of activist approach to the technology.
Siska: You engage with it on your own terms—it’s never imposed on you. Entering this monument is a conscious choice, unlike the traditional monuments that dominate city spaces, like the Bismarck Monument, which looms over you whether you want it to or not. In a way, this is our step toward liberation. This project is both an experiment and a starting point, exploring new ways to embed our personal histories into the urban landscape.
Photos: Alternatives Denkmal für Deutschland
You have created a monument that needs to be accessed intentionally, how do you place this within the idea of “monuments”?
Siska: Let me share an anecdote deeply intertwined with Berlin’s history. In one of my previous projects, Latent Border(s), I delved into the story of the Lenin Monument that once stood in East Berlin during the GDR era. Erected in 1970 at Leninplatz, it was a prominent symbol of the socialist regime. Following German reunification, the monument faced opposition from local authorities. In 1991, it was dismantled and buried in a forested area on the outskirts of Berlin. Years later, in 2015, the 3.5-tonne granite head of Lenin was unearthed after being largely forgotten. This excavation was part of an effort to recontextualize Berlin’s historical monuments. Today, Lenin’s head is displayed at the Spandau Citadel as part of a permanent exhibition showcasing Berlin’s political monuments. This narrative reflects the shifting perspectives on historical symbols. Initially, the Lenin statue was buried as an attempt to move away from a past deemed undesirable. However, over time, it was resurrected and reinterpreted as an integral piece of history, illustrating how collective memory evolves and how artifacts can transition from objects of contention to subjects of reflection.
Emanuele: This is the transfiguration of historiography. At some point if it’s helpful, you use history for your own goals, you might change the details or you look to adapt the history for your own strategies or purposes. And this is exactly what we don’t want. For that reason, there is this deliberate choice to remember, you are free to choose: I want to remember. And in that sense, it’s an act of consciousness.
Mikala: In addition to choosing to access the monument, there is also the traditional history of monuments, they always seek to end history and create a closure. And this doesn’t reflect how our lives unfold. This doesn’t reflect the reality of our existence. So for us it was important to have a monument that keeps evolving, that doesn’t find a fixed form. The monument will probably never be finished. Because it keeps changing, it keeps growing. There have already been five different versions with each step of the development. We view the entire creation of the monument as a kind of social structure that works with different communities.
Emanuele: It’s that the monument is not only the monument itself, the digital space you enter, it’s also a collective space. A space that we create through programmes, through participation in different events, where we give the chance to create a space to gather for solidarity, for encounter, for exchange, for artistic development. So we have different layers of what the monument is. And I find it interesting that the monument is based on human encounters, on collective memory, on oral history, which is always forgotten. And I love that monuments are basically archives, at the very beginning it was histories traded from family members to other family members and to communities, to other community members and so on. In that sense our monument can embrace indigenous traditions, which did not build a Christopher Columbus or a Bismarck monument but were instead working on human connections.
Siska: It´s all about movement, fluidity, queerness, and feminism—spoken in a different voice. But at its core, it’s about metamorphosis. How does a discourse that is both political and biographical—rooted in migration, histories, and bodies—take shape as a visual monument, something you can access on your own terms? These are our stories, and we claim them. We decide when to press play, not when someone else chooses to observe, consume, or dissect them. Even this interview is part of that process. Stories become a monument, and then the monument dissolves back into words. It’s fluid, ever-changing, refusing to be fixed in place.