What the Directory Contained. What Art Dreams

What the Directory Contained. What Art Dreams 

By Natasha Marzliak

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

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

Start with the ear. 

A ceramic ear, cream-white and 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. It can receive nothing, while the room around it is full of sound. 

There is another ear in art history. In December 1888, Vincent van Gogh severed most of his left ear and brought it, wrapped in paper, to Gabrielle Berlatier, a young maid in Arles. The circumstances of the act remain uncertain, but the severed ear has come to signify sensitivity pushed beyond endurance. Yara Noémie Schaub’s ceramic ear belongs to this unstable lineage. 

Schaub made this ear to accompany a sound installation that translates telephonedirectory 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, and vanish. The sound does not narrate this or illustrate demographic change. It produces a trance-like acoustic environment that spreads through the entire exhibition space, entering the boxes, spheres, painted blueprints, film, and annotated directory pages until the whole room seems slightly submerged in it. The sound recalls Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, where syllables were released from ordinary language. Schaub’s number-rhythms similarly reach the nervous system before meaning can intercept them. Alphabetical order becomes duration, a century compressed into pattern. The method risks remaining more persuasive as an idea than as an acoustic composition; its numerical structure is easier to understand conceptually than its individual sonic decisions are to hear. The ceramic ear prevents the installation from remaining a data-conversion exercise. It gives abstraction a body and asks what these columns of names might become once the eye can no longer scan them in order. 

Standing in front of it, I think involuntarily of the orelhão, the public telephone booth shaped like an enormous orange ear that lined Brazilian street corners and squares when I was growing up in the 1990s. It was large enough to receive a head but never an entire body. To use it, you leaned into its curve, inserted a token, and pressed the receiver against your ear. The apparatus organized the body before it connected the voice. The city remained audible behind you, momentarily held at a distance. Privacy was always incomplete. Strangers stood close enough to overhear fragments of arguments, declarations of love, bad news, and arrangements for the evening while performing the courtesy of inattention. The orelhão is gone now, replaced by the telephone carried in the pocket, and with it went a particular quality of public intimacy, a specific arrangement of bodies, voices, and urban space. 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. 

Telephone directories promised a related form of public legibility. A name, an address, and a number offered a route from one person to another. That promise was always conditional. To be listed meant that a person had entered the telephone system and could be made publicly findable. Others remained absent, unlisted, displaced, unable to afford a subscription, or beyond the administrative reach of the directory. The exhibition is strongest when it enters the distance between a person who can be located and a life that can be known. 

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, and document clips. Inside are fragments of old telephone directories under plastic sheeting, the residual hardware of archival processing, and 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 telephonedirectory fragments and discarded document clips as if they were furniture. This desire is neither rational nor critical, and it belongs entirely to the work. Something in the scale of the object, its handmade quality, and the care given to its border 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 does not reside only in the object. It is also produced through the decision to treat an 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 performs this mechanism with the cheapest materials available: cardboard, watercolor, plastic sheeting, and discarded clips. The drawings of umbrellas and fire extinguishers, rendered with the attention one might give to illuminated-manuscript ornament, do not illustrate the contents. They declare those contents worthy of a frame. 

The sacred here is historical. Inside Vollrath’s boxes are the material traces of communication systems that organized daily life for more than a century and have now become obsolete. The telephone directory, scanner, compact disc, and document clip were technologies through which people located one another, reached one another, and filed one another into manageable order. Their obsolescence is not neutral. It marks the end of a particular form of collective legibility. Telephone directories may appear to embody the promise of an open society in which individuals are publicly named and findable. Yet, as Karl Schlögel’s reading of Moscow address books demonstrates, visibility was never equally distributed. Access to directories, addresses, telephones, and unpublished numbers also reflected social hierarchy and political power. A system that made one person reachable could render another invisible or dangerously exposed. 

Reliquienschrein digital (2025) is an earlier counterpart to the analog reliquary, built from electronic components and compact discs. Here, the materials announce obsolescence too quickly. A compact disc already carries a familiar aura of technological death, and the work sometimes depends upon that recognition rather than transforming it. By contrast, the analog box produces intimacy through scale, surface, and touch; its materials appear vulnerable, handled, and capable of decay. The digital reliquary raises an important question: whether a file can be mourned as a document can be mourned, whether data possesses a body capable of decay and residue. Yet here, the question is stronger than the object that carries it. 

War child. 

A boy of ten loses his father. The Second World War has ended, but its afterlife is long, and the family it leaves behind is a family missing one of them. Through a child-relief program organized by the Red Cross, the boy travels to Switzerland for summer stays with a host family, a country that is not his country, people who are not yet his people. He is a guest. He is happy there. He is a child already acquainted with catastrophe, spending the summer in a country that has survived the war differently from his own. The stay offers protection, but protection never occurs outside power. An organization selects the child; a foreign country receives him; an unfamiliar family temporarily becomes responsible for his safety. The relationship outlives the humanitarian structure that produced it. The Swiss family becomes his family. The connection that began as postwar assistance becomes something the program could not have predicted: a family that continues choosing itself across the generation that comes after. 

Kim Dotty Hachmann’s war child (2026) is presented on a screen embedded in 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, and that they belonged to 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 knowledge of arrival: the unfamiliar room, the language spoken around the table, the body learning that it is safe, or what it meant for Hachmann, decades later, to continue calling this family her own. The boy grew up and passed the story on to his children. After his death, Hachmann made the film from three unstable bodies of material: what he had told them, what the Swiss family remembered and communicated in interviews, and what the archive could verify. These sources do not always describe the same events in the same way. Memory protects certain details, alters others, and assigns emotional weight to moments the administrative record cannot detect. The archive confirms location while remaining silent about attachment. No source becomes sovereign. 

The video moves through architectural interiors, railway-station clocks, and winter tree branches in black and white. It does not reconstruct the summers. It moves through the visual residue of a history recovered from documents, from a father’s voice now also gone, and from the voices of the family in Switzerland who remain able to speak it. The trolley as plinth forces a posture of examination. You stand over the screen looking down, assuming the position of someone reading a document, but what you are reading is not a document. It is a story the father told his daughter; it is what the Swiss family remembers; it is the daughter’s grief for the father; it is her attachment to a family she chose to keep as hers; and it is a film set inside a cart once used to move the records of the telephone system through institutional space. The layering is structural. The film is made of what remained. 

The screen holds its temperature. There is a version of this story that would insist on its emotional weight, reconstructing the Swiss summers through warm light, actors, period detail, and domestic reassurance. Hachmann refuses that version. The film is cold and precise. Its restraint is its discipline and occasionally its risk. The desaturated images can turn absence into atmosphere, permitting winter trees and empty architecture to perform grief on the viewer’s behalf. The film becomes stronger when it remains inside the disagreement among testimony, family memory, and archival verification. The coldness is not distance. It is the specific temperature of grief for a father who is gone, held beside a family who is not, a gift that outlived the man who first received it. 

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 fused plastic units in primary colors, fragments of white lace, and pixel-like patterns built from individual pieces. The spheres are clear, and light enters them differently according to where the viewer stands. They reflect the entire hall in their curved surfaces, compressing the room into miniature: the pedestals, carts, yellow-lit panels of the permanent exhibition, and 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 asks the imagination to complete what the eye cannot see. Becker’s spheres test this proposition, although their transparency is less a guarantee of access than an instrument of distortion. They hover close enough to invite inspection and too high to be held. Their surfaces promise visibility while reorganizing the room through curvature. Histories, wars, marriages, migrations, and different epochs appear to be sealed inside transparent shells, yet nothing inside them remains entirely clear. This is both the installation’s force and its limitation. Transparent spheres readily become worlds, memories, futures, or preserved histories; the symbolism approaches familiarity. The work becomes more specific when the viewer notices that its apparent openness never provides undistorted access. The archive appears as a series of sealed atmospheres rather than a stable storehouse. 

Becker’s blueprint work, The Body Is the Message (2025), takes a technical drawing of the Hausrohrpoststation II Zürichand crosses it with a painted orange spiral. The technical drawing organizes movement in advance. Its thin lines define routes, connections, and the efficient transfer of physical objects through a building. The painted spiral records another kind of movement: the pressure of a hand crossing the page. It moves through the blueprint without obeying the routes prescribed by the document and carries the presence of the people whose names filled the telephone directories, who were listed, numbered, and made findable by the same infrastructure the blueprint was designed to serve. The directory gave them addresses. The blueprint organized the systems through which those addresses could be reached. The spiral is what neither document could hold: a life with an address, a number, and a place in the system that still exceeds all three. 

This matters because Becker is showing the work in the Museum of Communication, an institution whose curatorial logic is built around the history of transmission and the progressive development of systems capable of sending messages from one point to another. Yet the spiral does not simply oppose sensation to communication. It reveals the bodily pressure and human labor already present within technical systems that present themselves as neutral infrastructure. A structure designed to regulate movement receives a mark that cannot be used as an instruction. What moved through these systems was never only information. Bodies operated them, voices entered them, and lives exceeded the routes established for their movement. 

This collapse of function runs through the exhibition. A ceramic ear cannot hear. A telephone directory ceases to locate. A library trolley no longer transports books. A technical blueprint loses control over the route drawn upon it. The archive’s materials begin to act once they stop performing the tasks assigned to them. 

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 telecommunications infrastructure and pre-Columbian funerary technology runs through the mask as a container for a face, a means of preserving the features of the dead so that the living may continue to address them. It also runs through a history of labor. The Telefonistin, the telephone operator, was almost always a woman. Her voice was the medium through which the directory’s list of names became an actual connection. The death mask preserves the face. The telephone preserved the voice. The association is provocative and historically incomplete. The movement from Chimú funerary culture to Swiss telephone labor remains largely analogical; the notebook opens a route without fully confronting the geographical and historical distance it crosses. Its most consequential subject is the operator herself. A communication system that presented itself as technical infrastructure depended upon feminized labor trained to disappear into its operation. The directory offered names and numbers, but connection required a body and a voice. 

Judith Boy draws directly on the archival surface. Chanukke für Mahatma Scholem (2020) lays a menorah in green and gold across the open pages of a wartime telephone directory. A Magen David occupies the center, and a small photographic fragment of barbed wire appears near the lower edge. Jewish names identified through Boy’s research during the archival workshops remain visible beneath the drawn forms. They are not obscured. They remain legible. The menorah crosses them, and they persist through it. 

Boy has spoken of her debt to Dada, and the connection runs most clearly through Hannah Höch, whose From an Ethnographic Museum series, produced between 1924 and 1930, cut into the visual archives of colonial classification, placing bodies and fragments in arrangements the archive had never intended. Höch understood that the institutional document is never neutral. Its surfaces carry the logic of the system that produced it, and working directly on those surfaces rather than reproducing them from a critical distance makes a different kind of claim. Boy operates through the same physical insistence. The telephone directory is not reproduced or cited. It is marked. The page is opened, crossed, and made unable to return entirely to administrative neutrality. The menorah does not merely illustrate loss. It occupies the document and insists that the page cannot be separated from the lives it registered. 

The telephone directory confirmed that a community was present. It recorded names, addresses, telephone numbers, and a form of civic existence. Such registration offered no guarantee of protection. Administrative visibility could connect a person to society and simultaneously expose that person to surveillance, exclusion, or control. Different bureaucratic systems, operating with comparable habits of enumeration, classification, and demographic identification, could transform the same population from citizens into targets. Boy’s work holds this contradiction on a single surface. The menorah crosses the names while preserving their legibility, allowing registration, memory, threatened existence, and the contemporary act of looking to remain visible at once. Boy’s formal decision to draw directly onto the archival page alters the document permanently. The archive now contains something that was not there before. This is a claim: the archive does not own the lives it contains. 

Klimax Wandel Mythos Back layers Arabic script over directory columns organized through German-language headings and Latin typography. Pine trees, lips, a ceiling fan, tropical vegetation, and a coiling white paper snake accumulate across the surface. The intervention does not prove that every name entering the 

directory was forcibly Germanized or that every linguistic difference was erased in the same manner. It makes visible the pressure exerted whenever different languages, histories, and geographies are required to occupy a uniform administrative order. The directory’s apparent neutrality depends upon repetition.  

Every entry receives a standardized position. Names of different origins become equivalent as units of information even when the people bearing them inhabit unequal relations to citizenship, property, language, mobility, and public visibility. Boy places linguistic and visual density back onto a surface designed to suppress it. The result is not chaos but argument: the page was never as monolingual or as orderly as its columns claimed. 

What the archive sets in motion. 

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, 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, military occupation, mass displacement, and the reorganization of global power along axes the post-Cold War settlement declared obsolete. States continue to assert sovereignty over populations, territory, movement, and the question of who belongs where and under what name. They classify people through addresses, passports, databases, residency categories, biometric records, and documents that determine whose movement appears legal and whose presence becomes administratively suspect. The technology has changed. The desire to stabilize human movement through information remains. Telephone directories belonged to an earlier stage of this history. Their columns presented society as a public order in which each subscriber occupied a place and could be reached. They claimed comprehensiveness while recording only those who entered the telephone system under particular economic, administrative, and linguistic conditions. Equality of format concealed inequality of access. 

Into this moment, ICOM places the museum as a unifying institution. Museums do hold materials that might otherwise be lost and create conditions for encounters with objects that resist the simplifications of the present. Yet the exhibition in Bern proposed something more abrasive than preservation and less reassuring than unity. It entered the systems through which divisions are recorded, ordered, and maintained, and made those systems temporarily lose their stability. Pages became drawing surfaces, records became sound, library carts became screens, technical diagrams received bodily marks, and archival material entered workshops, artworks, photographs, personal testimony, museum display, and public digital circulation. The collaboration among Wikimedia CH, the PTT Archive, and the Museum of Communication did not stand outside the archive and denounce it. It entered through the archive’s own procedures and made them briefly lose their footing. What these five artists do is turn that infrastructure against itself, extracting from its columns what the columns were not designed to show. 

Sandra Becker conceived the project and developed it with Heike Bazak through CoCreation workshops held in the archive before the exhibition. Artists entered the archive, worked with its materials, and returned them in altered forms. The exhibition was also accompanied by a Wikimedia editathon, through which photographs and documentation entered Wikimedia Commons, including photographs I contributed. The project therefore did not end inside the museum. Yet Wikimedia Commons is not an institution-free space. It replaces one system of classification with another. Its materials circulate more widely and may be linked, edited, categorized, contested, or removed according to a different set of rules. 

Public access expands, but access remains mediated through licenses, permissions, technical knowledge, categories, and editorial judgment. 

The political force of the collaboration lies less in the fantasy of knowledge belonging to no institution than in the passage between institutions. Materials governed by the logic of telecommunications history moved through artistic interpretation, museum display, private memory, photography, and collaborative digital classification. Each passage altered what could be seen, who could name it, and how the material might return. The exhibition was an institutionally authorized act of disobedience. The institutions opened their own structures to interruption. The archive did not disappear, but it could no longer remain entirely identical to itself. 

What these five artists found in seventy meters of Swiss telephone directories was not unity. It was 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. The archive remained standing, but for the duration of the exhibition its materials forgot the functions that had kept them in place. 

Bibliography 

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Foreword by John R. Stilgoe. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.  

Bailey, Martin. “Name of Mystery Woman Who Received Van Gogh’s Ear Revealed for First Time.” The Art Newspaper, July 19, 2016.  

Ball, Hugo. Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary. Edited by John Elderfield. Translated by Ann Raimes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.  

Boswell, Peter, Maria Makela, and Carolyn Lanchner. The Photomontages of Hannah Höch. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996.  

International Council of Museums. “International Museum Day 2026: Museums Uniting a Divided World.” Accessed July 30, 2026.  

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Introduction by Lewis H. Lapham. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Originally published 1964.  

Museum of Communication Bern. “Pop-up: Wenn Künstlerinnen mit 

Telefonbüchern reden – und sie zu ihnen sprechen [When Women Artists Talk to Telephone Books—and They Talk Back].” May 19, 2026. Accessed July 30, 2026.  

Murphy, Bernadette. Van Gogh’s Ear: The True Story. London: Chatto & Windus, 2016.  

Schlögel, Karl. “Wsja Moskwa.” In Moskau lesen, 101–111. Berlin: Siedler, 1984.  

Natasha Marzliak is an art critic, curator, researcher, studio manager, and Associate Editor of the Art Style International Magazine.

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