The exhibition ECHO is devoted to the afterlife of history—or histories—in the present. In her artistic research, Michaela Melián traces the life and legacy of Julia Mann (née da Silva Bruhns). Presented at the Pavilion of the Overbeck-Gesellschaft and at St. Petri Cultural Church in Lübeck, the exhibition unfolds as a multilayered field of resonance composed of textiles, sculptural works, projections, and sound.
Through serial arrangements and samplings, visual and acoustic patterns emerge that overlap, condense, and at the same time remain elusive. Historical material appears in fragmentary form: ruptures, gaps, and absences are not resolved but deliberately made audible and visible. History is not presented as a clearly reconstructable past, but as a web of traces that only acquires meaning in the present—polyphonic, perspectival, and open-ended.
At the center of the exhibition stands Julia Mann, whose life has long been reduced to her role as the mother of Heinrich and Thomas Mann. Her own biography—shaped by colonial power structures in Brazil, involuntary migration to Lübeck, and bourgeois discipline—has largely been marginalized and exoticized. Melián takes up these suppressed aspects and opens a feminist and postcolonial space of reflection that re-examines German cultural history.
With a precise artistic gesture, Michaela Melián condenses historical motifs, materialities, and ways of life without resolving them into a linear narrative. The personal consistently appears as political. History remains unfinished—an echo that reverberates into the present and invites critical engagement.