What the Directory Contained. What Art Dreams, Museum of Communication, Bern

What the Directory Contained. What Art Dreams

A Critical Essay on the Pop-up Exhibition “When Artists Talk to Telephone Books and These Respond to Them: PTT Archive Meets Wikipedia – Telephone Directory Stories from the Past” Museum of Communication, Bern, 19–29 May 2026

Organized by Sandra Becker (GLAM Lead, Wikimedia CH) and Heike Bazak (Director, PTT Archive Bern) in the framework of the CoCreation Project, Wikimedia CH, in partnership with the PTT Archive and the Museum of Communication Presented on the occasion of International Museum Day 2026, International Council of Museums (ICOM)

by Natasha Marzliak, Curator, Art Critic, Professor of Art History and Aesthetics, and Associate Editor of Art Style Magazine

Start with the ear.
A ceramic ear, cream-white, anatomically faithful, sits under a vitrine in a darkened hall in Bern. It is approximately the size of a large hand. It is not attached to anything. The ear outside the head is, in the tradition of surrealist anatomical fragmentation, an organ that has become a thing, separated from the body that gave it function and placed under glass like a specimen from a collection whose logic has been lost.

There is another ear in art history. Van Gogh cut his and offered it to Gabrielle Berlatier, who worked at a brothel in Arles, a gesture so excessive and so strange that it has never been fully explained, only endlessly interpreted. What is certain is that the severed ear is not a symbol of loss of hearing. It is a symbol of hearing taken to its limit, of a sensitivity so acute it became unbearable and had to be removed. Yara Noémie Schaub’s ceramic ear seems to belong to this lineage.

Schaub made this ear to accompany a sound installation that translates telephone directory pages from Bern in 1926 and 2021 into rhythm. The directories are ninety-five years apart. What changes between them is who appears: names migrate, multiply, diversify, contract, vanish. The sound does not narrate this. It does not illustrate demographic change. It produces a trance-like acoustic environment that spreads through the entire exhibition space, contaminating the other works, seeping into the boxes and the spheres and the painted blueprints and the annotated directory pages until the whole room is slightly submerged in it. What the sound does in the room is closer to what Hugo Ball did at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, standing at the podium in a cardboard tube costume, producing syllables that belonged to no language and therefore to all of them simultaneously. Ball understood that sound could reach the nervous system before meaning could intercept it. Schaub’s number-rhythms operate on the same principle. They are not music and not speech and not noise. They are duration made audible, a century compressed into pattern. Whether the translation methodology produces results that are listenable rather than merely conceptually valid is a question the installation leaves genuinely open: what saves it is the ceramic ear, which converts that openness into a physical proposition about the body and its limits.

Standing in front of it, a critic who grew up in Brazil in the 1990s thinks involuntarily of the orelhão, the public telephone booth shaped like a giant orange ear that lined every Brazilian street corner and square for three decades. You put a token in, you pressed your ear against the receiver, the city noise dropped away, and for a moment you were connected to someone elsewhere. The orelhão is gone now, replaced by the phone in the pocket, and with it went a particular quality of public intimacy, of strangers standing close enough to overhear each other’s most private conversations while pretending not to. Schaub’s ceramic ear holds some of that loss without knowing it. The work comes from a Swiss archive, but the ear is the ear, and the ear remembers everything it has ever been used for.

Small boxes.
Violetta Vollrath’s Reliquienschrein analog (2026) is constructed from discarded institutional cardboard, its exterior borders decorated with watercolor drawings of umbrellas, fire extinguishers, insects, lightning bolts, document clips. Inside: fragments of old telephone directories under plastic sheeting, the residual hardware of archival processing, the small detritus of institutional maintenance. It sits under a vitrine like a reliquary, which is what it is, a container for something that has been decided to be sacred.

Standing in front of it, one wants to be inside it. Not metaphorically. Physically inside, reduced to the scale of the objects it contains, living among the telephone directory fragments and the discarded document clips as if they were furniture. This desire is not rational and it is not critical and it belongs entirely to the work. Something in the scale of the object, its handmade quality, the care given to the decorative border of umbrellas and fire extinguishers, produces a longing for smallness, for the protected interior, for the condition of being contained rather than containing. The reliquary is a house for the sacred. Vollrath’s reliquary is a house for the discarded.

What makes this theologically precise rather than merely poetic is the history of the reliquary form itself. The medieval goldsmith who constructed a container for a fragment of bone understood that holiness is not in the object but in the decision to treat the object as holy, to surround it with labor and material that exceed its intrinsic worth. The relic does not make itself sacred; the reliquary does. Vollrath uses the cheapest possible materials to perform this mechanism: cardboard, watercolor, plastic sheeting, discarded clips. The border of umbrellas and fire extinguishers, drawn with the care one gives to illuminated manuscript ornament, does not illustrate the contents. It declares them worthy of this frame.

The sacred here is not metaphysical. It is historical. Inside Vollrath’s boxes are the material traces of communication systems that organized daily life for over a century and are now obsolete. The telephone directory, the scanner, the document clip: these are the technologies through which people located each other, reached each other, filed each other into manageable order. Their obsolescence is not neutral. It marks the end of a particular form of collective legibility, of the kind that Karl Schlögel described as the expression of open society, a society in which everyone who participated in the communication system was equally named and equally findable. Whether the digital systems that replaced them are equally democratic is a question the reliquaries pose by preserving what they replaced. Religuienschrein digital (2025) extends this into electronic components and CDs. It is less resolved than the analog version. Digital materials carry their own question: whether a file can be mourned the way a document can be mourned, whether data has a body that can decay and leave traces the way paper does. The question is not rhetorical. The CDs inside the box are already an obsolete format. In twenty years they will be as unreadable as a wax cylinder. Vollrath’s digital reliquary exists inside that timeline.

The third box, Reisegescheren analog (2024), contains scanner components and travel scissors, the instruments of archival transformation placed inside an archival container. The scanner converts the analog into the digital; the scissors cut one thing from another. Both are now inside a reliquary, preserved alongside what they once processed. The circularity is the argument.

A boy of nine loses his father.
The war has been over for some years but its afterlife is long and the family it leaves behind is a family missing one of them. The boy travels to Switzerland for summer stays with a host family, a country that is not his country, people who are not his people. He is a guest. He is happy there. He is a little boy and the world has recently demonstrated its capacity for catastrophe and he is spending the summer in a country that stayed largely intact while his did not. The Swiss family becomes his family. His children will visit them. The connection that began as humanitarian hospitality during a war’s aftermath became something the war could not have predicted: a family that chose itself.

Kim Dotty Hachmann’s war child (2026) is presented on a screen set into the surface of a Bibliothek PTT cart, a battered wooden trolley on metal wheels that has traveled through institutional corridors for decades. The viewer stands over the screen, looking down.

Somewhere in the PTT Archive there is a telephone directory that lists the address of the Swiss family. Name, street, number. The directory confirms that they existed, that they lived where they lived, that they were part of the connective tissue of a country that briefly received a child from elsewhere. The directory can confirm this. What it cannot confirm is the particular quality of that arrival, what it meant to be nine years old and already acquainted with catastrophe and to spend a summer somewhere that functions. The boy grew up, told the story to his children, and died. Hachmann made a film from what he told them and from what the archive could verify, which are not the same materials even when they describe the same events.

The video moves through architectural interiors, railway station clocks, winter tree branches in black and white. It does not reconstruct the summers. It moves through the visual residue of a history recovered partly from documents and partly from a father’s voice, now also gone. The trolley as plinth forces a posture of examination. You stand over the screen looking down, the posture of someone reading a document, but what you are reading is not a document. It is a story the father told his daughter, and it is the daughter’s grief for the father, and it is a film that sits inside a cart that was itself once used to move the archives of the telephone system through institutional space. The layering is structural. The film is made of what remained.

The work does not sentimentalize. This is its discipline. There is a version of this story that would insist on its own emotional weight, that would reconstruct the Swiss summers with warm light and period detail. Hachmann refuses that version. The video is cold and precise and the coldness is not distance. It is the specific temperature of grief for something that was also happy, for a loss that sits alongside a genuine gift.

To dream. To imagine.
Sandra Becker’s ceiling installation, Kristallkugeln der Zukunft (2025), hangs transparent plastic spheres at varying heights above the exhibition floor, each containing small objects: Hama bead constructions assembled from small fused plastic beads in primary colors, fragments of white lace, pixel patterns built from individual colored units. The spheres are clear and light catches inside them differently depending on where you stand. They reflect the entire hall in their curved surfaces, compressing the room into miniature inside each one: the pedestals, the carts, the yellow-lit panels of the permanent exhibition, the other visitors. Each sphere is a world that contains the world that contains it.

Gaston Bachelard understood that smallness is not diminishment but concentration, that the miniature holds more than the large because it forces the imagination to complete what the eye cannot see. The spheres operate on this principle. They are small enough to hold everything the archive contains and everything it excludes: the names that were listed and the names that were not, the lives that passed through without leaving a directory entry because they moved too often or could not afford a subscription or bore names the orthographic system could not process. Histories, wars, marriages, migrations, different epochs sealed inside transparent shells, floating above the pedestals like planets whose atmospheres are made of collective memory and craft.

Becker’s blueprint work, The Body is the Message (2025), takes a technical drawing of the Hausrohrpoststation II Zürich and crosses it with a painted orange spiral. The title invokes McLuhan, and the invocation is exact: the pneumatic tube postal station is precisely a medium that became its own message, a system so efficient at routing physical objects that it made the human messenger redundant. The painted orange spiral is wide and fluid against the blueprint’s thin precise lines. It moves across the surface without following the routes the document prescribes. The orange lines carry the presence of the people whose names filled the telephone directories, who were listed and numbered and made findable by the same system this blueprint was designed to serve. The directory gave them addresses. The blueprint organized the infrastructure through which those addresses were reached. The spiral is what neither document could hold: a life that has an address, a number, a place in the system, and that exceeds all of it. Deleuze argued that art is not communication, that it produces sensation rather than transmitting information. The distinction matters here because Becker is showing this work in the Museum of Communication, an institution whose entire curatorial logic is built on the history of transmission, on the progressive development of systems for sending messages from one point to another. The spiral painted over the blueprint of a communication infrastructure proposes something that institution cannot fully accommodate: that what moved through these systems was not messages but people, and that the difference between the two is where art begins.

The notebooks, Die Telefonzellen (2025) and Die Telefonistin (2026), hold the exhibition’s most speculative gesture. Die Telefonistin opens to pencil sketches of faces annotated “Death mask out of blended metal, Chimú-culture, North Perú.” The connection it draws, between Swiss postal infrastructure and pre-Columbian funerary technology, runs through the shared logic of the mask as container for a face, a technology for preserving the features of the dead so that the living can continue to address them. It also runs through a history of labor: the telefonistin, the telephone operator, was almost always a woman, and her voice was the medium through which the directory’s list of names became actual connection. The death mask preserves the face. The telephone preserved the voice.

Archives and Dada.
Judith Boy draws directly on the archival surface. Chanukke für Mahatma Scholem (2020) lays a menorah in green and gold across open pages of a wartime telephone directory, placing the Magen David at the center and a small photographic fragment of barbed wire in the lower left corner. The names beneath the drawn forms are Jewish names, identified through Boy’s research in the archive. They are not obscured. They remain legible. The menorah is drawn over them and they persist through it.

Boy has spoken of her debt to Dada, and the connection runs most precisely through Hannah Höch, whose From an Ethnographic Museum series (1924-1930) cut directly into the visual archives of colonial classification, placing bodies and fragments in configurations the archive never intended and could not contain. Höch understood that the institutional document is never neutral, that its surfaces carry the logic of the system that produced it, and that working directly on those surfaces rather than reproducing them from a critical distance is a different kind of claim. Boy operates on the same principle. The telephone directory is not reproduced or cited. It is marked. The menorah drawn across the names does not illustrate loss. It occupies the document, insisting that it belongs to those it registered.

The telephone directory confirmed that a community was present, that its members had addresses and telephone numbers and civic existence. A different bureaucratic system, organized with equal precision, equally alphabetical in its logic, was simultaneously working to end that civic existence. The two systems were contemporaneous. They drew on the same demographic reality. Boy’s formal decision to draw directly onto the archival page rather than reproduce it alters the document permanently. The archive now holds something that was not there before. This is a claim: that the document belongs to those it registered, that the archive does not own the lives it contains.

Klimax Wandel Mythos Back layers Arabic script over German directory columns, pine trees, a coiling white paper snake, lips, a ceiling fan, tropical vegetation. The directory transcribed all names into German orthography regardless of their origin. A name that arrived in Arabic, Turkish, or Serbo-Croatian was processed into the form the system could manage. The original name was not preserved. Boy’s layering places Arabic script back onto a surface built to exclude it, and the visual density that results is not chaos but argument: the directory page was never as monolingual as it claimed to be, and the names it standardized into German columns carried languages, histories, and geographies the columns could not hold.

The International Council of Museums has organized International Museum Day for over forty years. The theme for 2026 is Museums Uniting a Divided World. The choice of words deserves scrutiny. Not museums interpreting a divided world, or documenting one, or making its divisions visible. Uniting.

The divisions in question are not abstract. They are wars whose territorial logic recalls the mid-twentieth century, border regimes tightening across Europe, the reorganization of global power along axes that the post-Cold War settlement declared obsolete. The geopolitical world of 2026 resembles, in some respects, the world in which the telephone directory first appeared: a world of nation-states asserting sovereignty over populations, over territory, over who belongs where and under what name. The directory listed everyone. Other systems, operating on the same data, decided that listing was not enough.

Into this moment, the ICOM places the museum as a unifying institution. Museums do hold things that would otherwise be lost, do create conditions for encounters with materials that resist the simplifications of the present. But what this exhibition proposes is something more specific than preservation. The collaboration between Wikimedia CH and the PTT Archive was conceived precisely as a counter- movement: to take an archive built on the mathematical logic of classification, on the reduction of lives to names and numbers in alphabetical columns, and open it to artistic practices that read it differently. The same infrastructure that connected also sorted, also excluded, also made certain bodies more findable than others wanted them to be. What these five artists do is turn that infrastructure against itself, extracting from its columns what the columns were not designed to show.

Wikimedia CH’s model of open-source, collectively produced knowledge carries its own proposition about democratic access to information, one that rhymes with the telephone directory’s original democratic logic and pushes it further: knowledge that belongs to no institution, that can be edited, contested, expanded by anyone. The collaboration between Wikimedia and the PTT Archive is the exhibition’s least examined structural decision, and it is the one with the most political content. It places the archive’s materials inside a system of circulation that the archive itself was never built for.

What these five artists found in seventy meters of Swiss telephone directories is not unity. It is density: the density of lives that passed through a system designed to make them findable, and the irreducible excess of those lives over the data the system produced. That excess is what art reaches.

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