a former child
synthetic memories
Between the 1950s and 1990s, up to 12 million children were sent away in West Germany and around 2 million in East Germany. City children were sent to health resorts for six weeks at a time for rest, recuperation, or weight gain.
What was intended to be a vacation often turned out to
be a place of horror and violence.
It is only in recent years that the suffering of the former children sent away has become visible.
This project explores how design can function as an epistemic practice to communicate subjective and implicit forms of knowledge—especially in contexts where language, documentation, and conventional research methods reach their limits. Situated within memory work, images are not understood as representations of reality, but as responses to emotions, conversations, hesitations, and gaps in narration.
Starting from the family history of the artist’s mother and an engagement with transgenerational and collective trauma—particularly the history of the Verschickungskinder—the project combines personal photography, interviews, and site visits with AI-generated imagery. Generative AI is not used to reconstruct truth, but as a design-led research medium capable of giving form to memory gaps, the unspeakable, and affective states without claiming factual accuracy.
Over the course of the process, the author’s own position as a designer became central. Questions of representation, ethics, and responsibility in visualizing trauma increasingly shaped the work. Rather than depicting explicit scenes of violence or abuse, the project deliberately works with fragments, distorted or absent faces, removed bodies, and visual voids. In some cases, prompts are presented instead of images, emphasizing absence over depiction. The image is not treated as evidence, but as a space of memory, projection, and inquiry.
The result is a hybrid visual language situated between memory and reconstruction, presence and absence. The project understands design as a means of conveying emotional truth without asserting objective truth, and demonstrates how design can help activate subjective knowledge—making collective wounds, inherited trauma, and the unrepresentable perceptible without fixing them into definitive narratives.