Notes from Elsewhere

On movement, memory, SCOPE Berlin, and the soft returns that follow.

Author

l’appartement 49C
July 25th, 2025

Dear friends,

This season carries a different tempo: slower days beating the heat, cooler nights talking with friends over wine and conversation. For us at apt49c, summer has become synonymous with displacement. The necessary practice of leaving familiar ground and returning a bit changed. 

We were recently in Berlin, where long walks between galleries and conversations with both new encounters and familiar faces reshaped our understanding of what we’re doing here. Travel has taught as that it can function less as an escape and more like a return to essential questions seen from unfamiliar angles.  

This letter shares some memories from our trip, a few questions that followed us home, some thoughts we felt worth sharing, and the particular kind of clarity that merges only after spending time away from home.

From Berlin: What We Witnessed and Who Changed Our Thinking

At the heart of our visit was the SCOPE BLN residency, a residency that understands the vulnerability inherent in creative process. Here, artists, curators, and thinkers gather to explore ideas in their earliest, most vulnerable forms. That precarious space where ideas remain malleable, still responsive to their environments.

These studio visits possessed an intimacy rarely available in gallery contexts. We witnessed work in conversation with itself, the openness that occurs in the middle of artists and their creation, seeing how they think through material rather than about it. It was a great reminder that the most compelling art emerges not from fully formed concepts but from sustained attention to what wants to emerge through the act of making itself.

Here are a few encounters still echoing:

Studio visit with Audrey Theobald

Audrey Theobald approaches grief as material investigation, finding in everyday textures the residue of care that outlasts its original recipients. Her work suggests that mourning might be less about absence than about learning to perceive presence differently.

Studio visit with Drinkmilk

Drinkmilk (Luc Cimino and Gracie Margherita Elbel) interrogates digital desire with the precision of phenomenologists, treating screen mediated longing as legitimate erotic territory. Their collaborative practice refuses the binary between virtual and material experience, insisting instead on the interface as site of genuine encounter.

Studio visit with Joseph James Francis

There is something captivating about watching an artist work with whatever’s at hand. Transforming the ambient sounds of a space, the brush of a block of foam, the scratch of a metal pole, into something that feels both intentional and intuitive. Joseph James Francis creates sonic conditions urging us to listen more than understand. Spending time with him reminded us why we fell in love with art in the first place. His approach to sound as a lived experience rather than aesthetic object suggests that attention itself might be political territory. A way of inhabiting space that resists dominant narratives about who and what deserves our sustained attention.

Studio visit with Jo Birdsell

Jo Birdsell documents queer recovery with the kind of clear-eyed compassion and clarity, showing how healing can function as resistance, how the daily practice of caring becomes a form of cultural critique.

There’s a particular kind of hope that borders an obsession, something fragile yet unrelenting, like prayers whispered in languages that we are still learning. Ida Sophia’s durational performances embody exactly this quality, creating space for the kind of devotional attention that refuses both cynicism and easy comfort.

Across these diverse artists and their practices, attention becomes devotion. Whether to pigeons, prayers, code, or sound. In that devotion, we’re reminded that survival, desire, and care aren’t abstract ideas, but deeply embodied realities shaped by space, ritual, and memory.

Object Memory: The Shoes We Wore There

Back in New York, even mundane objects feel different, as if we carry traces of elsewhere. The shoes we wore through Berlin’s summer streets now rest by the door, softer, creased, still carrying dust. They don’t tell the whole story, but they remember the ground we walked on (literally and metaphorically).

There’s something about how objects absorb experience, becoming inadvertent archives of movement through space and time.

Arts News That Made Us Look: The Group Show, Rethought

In art world news, the summer group show is shifting. Once a placeholder, it’s becoming a space for thoughtful curation. A recent ARTnews piece reflects on this trend, what we might call durational curation: something slower, and more of a looser format opens up room for unexpected narratives to emerge through extended engagement rather than thematic imposition.

What kinds of stories emerge when you’re not rushing toward a theme? What if the “in-between” months are the most revealing?

Trip Down Memory Lane: Jonathan Grado at l’appartement 49c

Jonathan Grado, Dirty Static, at l’appartement 49C

Earlier this year, Jonathan Grado presented Dirty Static, a part of our Fragments in Our Home exhibition where he meditated on interference and memory. His quiet investigation of glitch aesthetics revealed how technical glitches might function as visual metaphor for the way memory itself resists clarity.

In a recent blog post, Grado reflects on the tactile dimensions of printing images and the act of printing and pairing them. His work asks crucial questions about what it means to make visible that which cannot be fully comprehended. How aesthetic strategies might parallel the way we process trauma, loss, or simply the daily accumulation of experience that exceeds our capacity for complete understanding.

 Prints from this series remain available through direct inquiry.

Reach us at [email protected]

Curator’s Bookshelf  - White Sands by Geoff Dyer

“The art of travel is not about finding the exotic, but about recovering the ordinary in unfamiliar forms.”
—Geoff Dyer

We’ve been re-reading White Sands, where Geoff Dyer interweaves fiction and nonfiction to craft an often hilarious, always inquisitive travelogue about the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves.

The hybrid between travel writing and cultural criticism demonstrates how displacement can function as methodology for deeper seeing. Dyer understands that travel’s value lies not in exotic discovery but in recovering the ordinary through unfamiliar configurations.

Each essay functions as extended meditation on attention itself: how place shapes perception, how movement through space generates new questions rather than settled answers.

For those of us interested in curatorial practice, Dyer’s work suggests how cultural criticism might embrace uncertainty as productive rather than problematic condition.

Final Reflections

If this letter reached you mid-shift, mentally, geographically, or otherwise… we hope it offered a small pause, and we invite you to share it with someone else in a similar journey.

The practice of leaving and returning, of allowing unfamiliar perspectives to reshape familiar territory, remains essential to any serious engagement with contemporary culture. Summer’s slower rhythms create space for the kind of sustained attention that rushed seasons rarely afford.

If you'd like to stay close as the season unfolds, follow us on Instagram: @apt49c.

We hope that you will drink in as many lazy summer days as you can, preferably with a book that challenges your assumptions about what you thought you already understood.

— Steffie, Olivia, and Tessa