As an artist, I rely on personal experience to speak about my process of becoming.

Currently, I am the Artistic and Executive Director of a multi-media Locker of Memory Memorial Project located at the Jungfernhof concentration camp on the outskirts of Riga, Latvia. I am the granddaughter of murdered victims. In 1941. 3985 German and Austrian Jews were imprisoned and killed at the camp, in neighboring camps, or in the surrounding forests, Only 149 persons survived. The stories about camp life are filled with brutality and sorrow. My time is consumed with project management, but my inner life is devoted to the painful experience of being tortured, ruthlessly murdered, and then forgotten. When I visited the camp in 2007, and again in 2010, the land was strewn with refuse and piles of rotting garbage. In 2019, I learned the camp had been transformed into a recreation park. The trash was gone and the pitted surface had been leveled and regraded. There was no hint of prior violence. The mass grave containing up to 800 bodies was incongruous with what was now an idyllic landscape for leisure and relaxation.

Horrified by the scope of erasure applied to the camp’s history, I secured perfunctory permissions from Latvian authorities to establish plans for a memorial at the site. I wrote grants and began working with historians and scientists to recover the history of the camp and, in particular, to locate the mass grave purported to contain up to 800 bodies. In 2023, scientists using non-invasive ground penetrating radar, found an anomaly in the ground, indicative of the mass grave. Bone fragments have been retrieved and are currently undergoing evaluation. DNA extraction may be possible.

The Locker of Memory project has evolved over the course of fifteen years as an ambitious international project, capturing different aspects of my work as an artist, activist, art therapist, and community organizer. Growing out of earlier projects, such as The Vienna Project, the Exiled Memory project, the Tattoo project, and Earthwounds, the Locker of Memory project represents a culmination of my ideas about loss and redress through artistic means. Technology is used to enhance interactive capacities within each project.

Preoccupied with how human beings are valued and discarded, remembered and forgotten, I am fascinated by manifestations of power, who has power, how power is used, and how power can be mediated by creating receptive spaces for listening. I tend to work in a variety of contexts. I create large-scale video installations in public space and I make small, intimate objects that evoke feelings of privacy.

Memory inhabits the core of my being. I am drawn to the stories we inherit and the stories we live. The Holocaust feels especially rich, layered with images that stimulate my imagination, confront my deepest fears and values about what truly matters.