In 1974 the Berlin-based lesbian activist group, “L. 74,” invited the 77 year old psychologist Charlotte Wolff to return to Berlin for the first time since her emigration in 1933 to Paris and then London. Wolff’s return to Berlin inspired her 200 page memoir, “Hindsight,” in which she recorded her personal recollections of Berlin in the Weimar period as they were evoked by the same radically altered city forty-four years later. This project concerning Charlotte Wolff’s return to Berlin is a 12 minute video-loop installation with sound that explores the numerous processes of memory activated by Wolff’s journey. The project focuses on the wide range of resonances between Wolff and Berlin, consisting of both private memory (Wolff’s) and public social memory that became important for the Women’s movement and lesbian groups in Germany in the 1970s. Wolff studied medicine, philosophy, and psychology in Freiburg, Königsberg and Berlin, becoming part of the social circle that included Franz Hessel and Walter Benjamin. As a doctor she was instrumental in implementing family planning programs in Berlin. In 1933 she was arrested by the Gestapo for wearing men’s clothes and charged as a spy. She was released by a Gestapo authority when he recognized that Wolff was his wife's doctor. Unable to practice medicine in Paris and London after fleeing National Socialism in Germany, Wolff turned to psychology and sexuality, writing ground-breaking studies of bisexuality and homosexuality as well as a critical biography of the Berlin sexual reformer Magnus Hirschfeld.
One of the 2 projected images shows the interior of an airplane that retains its appearance from 1974. The work is sot entirely inside a ‘retired’ and preserved Caravel jet aircraft now housed in a transportation museum. The Caravel was one of the planes most commonly used at the time within Europe. Long takes exploring architectural and tactile aspects of the cabin interior unfold whilst on the other screen we read Charlotte Wolff's thoughts reflecting on her voyage to Berlin. She connects the person she once was when she left to the person who returned. These projected "subtitles" caption and label the ambiguous images of the airplane interior, creating a cognitive dissonance or split attention which must be navigated by the viewer.