My Grandparents

Memories of our grandparents are above all childhood memories of old people. Yet, what do we really know about the days when our grandparents were young? They are our most personal link to a past we only know from films and books–but how did our grandparents live and love in these days? And what is left of it now?

In his long term project My Grandparents|Memory Bureau Mats Staub pursued these questions by asking generations of grandchildren to join him for a talk. At every venue the Memory Bureau was a place of both production and reception: on one side conversations took place, have been recorded, cut and transferred to iPods–on the other side visitors could move freely through the growing collection of stored and incomplete memories; they got a glimps of other people’s life stories and at the same time retraced their own grandparent’s story.

My Grandparents enquires about the grandchildren’s perspective and evoques personal questions about social background, oral tradition, remembering and forgetting, about the relationship between family story and world history, about stories and the so called truth.

For the Artbook Meine Grosseltern / My Grandparents (Edition Patrick Frey, 2010), Mats Staub brought together grandparents of different generations: The earliest born grandmother died in 1945—the youngest was born in 1939. They lived through the world economic crisis, war and expulsion, post-war reconstruction and modernisation. Mats Staub is able to draw the rudimentary biographical information and events from the many anecdotal memories of later generations. These life stories and pictures intersect, forming a web of countless empty spaces that spark the imagination.

Edition Patrick Frey N° 94, 2010
Hardcover, 192 pages, 115 B/W images, 22 × 15.7 cm

"Amazingly, one begins to (re-)construct the memory of one‘s own grandparents. Focusing on the fate of totally unknown people leads to one‘s own history. What began as a visit to strangers, ends in a kind of selfassertion."
Theater heute, 8/9 2009

"When speaking to Mats Staub not only memories emerge, one also notices what he or she does not know. And one notices, slightly annoyed, that one never asked the grandparents or parents about it. Therefore, Mats Staub is far more interested in these blanck spots than in amusing stories. It is in these spots that wider correlations appear which go beyond family tales."
Der Bund, 22.04.2008

"The frontieres of the disciplines are long blurred and you catch yourself watching yourself and other peo- ple who are watching their grandparents in their imagination. A kind of new theatre emerges, involving everybody, even the dead. [...] The past itself is at stake and the atmospere is slightly melancholic. And still, there is just as much of the past as of the present – and of the present of the visitors – that is recorded here."
bz 13.09.2008