Opening hours daily 11:00 AM - 4:00 PM

The exhibition ECHO is dedicated to the reverberations of history(ies) in the present. In her artistic research, Michaela Melián follows the traces of Julia Mann (née da Silva Bruhns). In the pavilion of the Overbeck Society and in the cultural church St. Petri in Lübeck, she unfolds a multifaceted resonance field of textiles, sculptures, projections, and sound.

In serial arrangements and samplings, visual and auditory patterns emerge that overlap, condense, and simultaneously elude. Historical material remains fragmentary: breaks, gaps, and voids are not closed but are consciously kept audible and visible. History appears here not as a clearly reconstructable past but as a web of traces that only takes on meaning in the present – polyphonic, perspectival, and open.

At the center of the exhibition is 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 relations in Brazil, involuntary migration to Lübeck, and bourgeois discipline – has largely been marginalized and exoticized. Melián addresses these repressed aspects and opens a feminist and postcolonial space for reflection that reexamines German cultural history.

With precise artistic gesture, Michaela Melián condenses historical motifs, materialities, and ways of life without narratively elaborating them. The personal always appears as political. History remains unfinished – as an echo that resonates in the present and invites critical engagement.

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ECHO - Exhibition: Michaela Melián

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