Just as one can never return to the same time and place, so too are time and place never quite the same again. This is the central lesson to take from Naomi Middelmann’s vast body of work, which continually returns to questions of memory, geography, and migration, approached with poetic intuition.

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In Middelmann’s work, we witness the creative interplay between the acts of disruption and encounter, leading to an understanding  of place-making and recollection as creative and endlessly open processes. The very idea of land becomes a living, breathing, and ever-shifting presence. Her practice has long grappled with the complexities of geographic place-making, migration, and personal memory. Her work often turns back in time to join found objects and archival materials with light or ephemeral surfaces such as gauze canvases or skin-like papers.

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What makes Middelmann’s work so compelling is the sensitivity with which she engages complex narratives that span histories, geographies, and political ruptures. Rather than approaching her subjects with the dispassion of a scientist, she honors the subjective, fluid, and organic nature of memory. Her work seeks not to document but to feel—recollecting and reconstructing family stories almost as though translating the work of an oral historian into the visual language of painting, drawing, collage, and textile work. This is why she opts for a wide range of media, including found objects, discarded letters, hand-sewn textile installations, drawings, etchings, and paintings.

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In “Family History” (2023), she transcribes a book written by her grandfather in German–a language foreign to her–tracing their family lineage from 1412 to 1986. Middelmann expands upon her grandfather’s deeply personal chronicle, which reflects broader historical traumas, including the rise of fascism in Europe and her own family’s migration across five continents.

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In “Delusions of Certainty” (2023), Middelmann transforms vintage maps of Europe, Africa, and the Americas dated from the 1920s to the 1970s, into organ-like sculptural formations that confront the bodily effects of displacement. With meticulous precision, she cuts out the roadways of these maps, reimagining them as “Bloodlines,” or the veins that indicate both life and loss. In challenging the scientific objectivity of cartography, therefore, Middelmann reveals the corporeal nature of home and the pain of losing an organ through the lens of a migrant’s displacement.

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Whether reenacting the painstaking labor of hand-copying a book in a foreign language or constructing roads that were never traveled, Middelmann’s work resists archival certainty while leaning into the power of personal narrative. Ultimately, Middelmann’s art hovers in the interstitial space between knowing and feeling, imagination and memory.

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Aesthetically, her work balances fragility with resilience. Sharp black pigments hurry across delicate paper surfaces. Red hand-stitched yarns try to contain the loose fringes of transparent gauze. These seemingly contradictory elements come together to tell stories—and in doing so, her process reveals a deep affinity with the creative act of writing.

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This connection to writing stems in part from her own background in Creative Writing and publishing. Indeed, the writerly dimension of her practice remains both technically and conceptually formative. In Middelmann’s work, we see a lifelong engagement with language, reading, and writing not just as systems of meaning-making, but as methods of connection.  Gestures of tracing letters on gauze or impressing text on paper serve as bridges to distant, if not disparate, places. Through the physically demanding acts of handwriting, patterning, sewing, and reassembling, her practice reflects on one's own inscription within broader historical struggles and political narratives.

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Her impressive oeuvre on memory, her career focus on narrating the contradictory markers of place and time, and her signature use of delicate or ephemeral surfaces reveal the paradox at the heart of all memorialization projects: that only when something is lost does it fully become memory. The tactile and labor-intensive nature of her practice therefore, mirrors the Sisyphean effort to preserve what is always imminently slipping away.

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Dr. Vuslat D. Katsanis
MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture
https://postcollapse.art/ 
Stampfenbachstrasse 32 | 8006 Zürich, Switzerland