Vanessa Gravenor, Free Recall (2024/25), UHD, Stereo Sound, 25 min
Vanessa Gravenor, Cover, Duck & (2023), HD Video, Stereo Sound, 5 min
Vanessa Gravenor, Free Recall (2024/25), UHD, Stereo Sound, 25 min
Screening and Conversation
Screening Evening
Free Recall: Baltic Military History Architecture
Otte 1 – Künstlerhaus Eckernförde
December 5, 2025, 6 pm
The screening evening Free Recall: Baltic Military History Architecture brings together two recent short video essays and a newly begun artistic research project by Berlin-based artist Vanessa Gravenor, current artist-in-residence at Otte 1 Künstlerhaus Eckernförde. Her video essays come out of the artist’s multi-year research into warning exercises, ideologically influenced historical advertisements, maneuvers, and hydrological rituals from the Cold War to the present. The works Free Recall (2024/25) and Cover, Duck & (2023) examine in particular how threats and militarization affect peripheral regions, with a special focus on the Baltic Sea as a space of appearance. During her residency scholarship at Otte 1, Gravenor specifically spent time researching in different archives in Schleswig-Holstein, from state archives to alternative community archives (such as Heimatgemeinschaft Eckernförde e.V.), weaving difficult knowledge from wounded landscapes with bodies of water, bodies, and inner psychic life.
Following the screening, the artist will be in conversation with visual culture studies scholar and art educator Ulrike Gerhardt about Vanessa Gravenor’s material and corporeal staging of landscape as a storage medium for human memories. The ghostly architectures rising from the Baltic Sea and the sandy soil (Free Recall), film strips (Cover, Duck &), and the camouflaged beach promenade from her ongoing filmic research emerge as memory storage devices and historical media that directly touch the cinematic narrator and viewers, pointing to inconsistencies, absences, and dangers in history.
Short Bios
Vanessa Gravenor is an artist and researcher who lives and works in Berlin. As an artist, she works primarily with video and film on the themes of interwoven traumas, war archives, and psychological narratives. Her artistic works have been exhibited at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, Kim? in Riga, nGbk, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin, and VISIO in Florence. She is currently completing her artistic-theoretical dissertation at the HFBK Hamburg entitled “Keeping Secret: Tracing Artistic Strategies towards Images at War after the Digital.”
Ulrike Gerhardt (PhD) is a postdoctoral fellow conducting research and teaching at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. Her research focuses on the aesthetic aftercare of former industrial landscapes in the (post-)socialist Anthropocene, the history of non-conformist art education in the GDR and inclusive, historically reflective and postdigital cultural education. Since 2016, she has been the co-director of the video art platform D’EST, and her doctoral thesis focused on the “Generation Transformation,” examining artists and collectives who experienced the upheaval after 1989/91 during their childhood (De Gruyter Brill, 2024).
The screening is a collaboration between Otte 1 – Künstlerhaus Eckernförde and the video art platform D’EST.