My project Passagen-Arbeit (Arcades-Work) began in 2012—promted by an interest in Walter Benjamin’s concept of archival writing—with visual research on the original manuscripts concerning the Parisian passages at the Walter Benjamin Archive in Berlin.

Guided by Benjamin’s handwritten texts (Schriftbilder) and his networked thinking, a long-term project took shape in various forms: In addition to a series of about 150 drawings engaging with the methodology of the Passagen-Arbeit, I followed in the author's footsteps to Paris and developed a Benjaminian map of Paris.
In response to my intensive engagement with the visual nature of the manuscripts, I produced a new edition of the Arcades Projekt in the form of a website
www.benjamin-passagen.de
which was presented and launched in 2014 at an event with media theorists Knut Ebeling and Siegfried Zielinski at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

The following pages present the different layers of the work.

research
drawings
conceptual spatial installation
Script Drawings
Paris
book publication
editions
online publication