Public Intervention at the Schanzl Bridge Advertising Column in Passau
From September 13 to 19, 2024 / in collaboration with Florian Schätz (face)
Fotos © Manuel Kreuzer (Büro für visuelle Gestaltung)
Home from Home is a reflection on distance, return, and the uncertain territory in between. The work emerged from a conversation between Ryul Song, Florian Schätz and Christian Schweitzer who have spent significant parts of their professional lives elsewhere away from home — in Frankfurt, Singapore, Seoul — and who now find themselves reconsidering what it means to leave, to return, and to belong.
Architecture is a discipline rooted in place, yet practiced increasingly in motion. Our biographies unfold across cities and continents, shaped by opportunities, constraints, and the silent promise that somewhere else might be different. Each departure alters our sense of home; each return reveals that home has changed in our absence.
Home from Home explores themes of identity, home, displacement, and the speculative “what if?” How has home evolved without us? What would change if we returned? Would our presence have altered its trajectory — and who might we have become had we never left? Who do we become when we negotiate life across multiple geographies? The work neither answers nor judges these questions. Instead, it exposes the tension of living simultaneously here and elsewhere — a condition that defines contemporary creative practice as much as it defines personal identity. It presents a quietly fatalistic reflection on a life lived between places, where belonging is elusive and every compromise reshapes not only ourselves, but also the communities we encounter.
Installed on an overlooked advertising column at the Schanzl Bridge in Passau, Home from Home occupies a site that is itself between conditions: visible yet ignored, central yet unattended. By temporarily claiming this structure as a public forum, the project turns a passive surface into an active space for projection, memory, and speculation.
The work is not about nostalgia or return, but about recognizing that every decision, every missed opportunity; every imagined alternative life leaves its mark. Home is never simply where we are. It is also where we might have been.
Hibiscus syriacus, Leontopodium nivale, Gentiana bavarica
