Gilbert is using photography as a visual method to negotiate her relationship with pre-exile family memories of Berlin. She has made recordings of her grandmother’s memories and taken them back to the places that they describe in Berlin, the city the grandmother was forced to leave as a Jewish teenager in 1933. Walking around Berlin, listening to her memories through headphones, Gilbert is able to immerse herself in the city’s past while seeing its present through the lens of her camera, taking photographs from a liminal space somewhere between the past and the present. She using her grandmother’s memories to guide her through the present-day city of Berlin while at the same time the city is a path through the grandmother's memories, a way to access Gilbert's family’s past. Gilbert is asking questions about the relationship between memory and place as well as the connection between the past and the present within family narratives. Her research considers how memories move through space when people migrate as well as how they are transmitted through time via transgenerational family narratives.
Photography
Photography