In the city of Hamburg, one can discover not only traces of the former colonial metropolis, but also traces of thought patterns that still exist, which have survived and have not ceased to exist - the «coloniality of power» (Aníbal Quijano). Part of these structures can be found - along with the representations of the last century, which are now part of the cultural heritage - in the forms of selective remembrance and conscious forgetting of history, which the city’s plaques of the cultural monuments (Kulturdenkmaltafel) recount.

The «blue plaques» initially try to give a first historical impression of the architecture of Hamburg’s cultural monuments. However, these plaques decide, depending on the building, what kind of memory may be illustrated. To give an example, in the case of buildings with a complicated colonial past, such as the Chile, Africa and Asia House, the colonial part of the past is not mentioned at all. Instead, a memory without memory is created out of the diplomatic formality of selective remembering. The installation «The City of Hamburg and its Afterlife of Colonialism» rewrites this forgotten memory by appropriating the institutional formality. It makes the forgotten both present and visible by showing the colonial traces in the context of other images and reflecting the constructed representations, as a visual form of «acting» (Aby Warburg).

The installation consists of two constructions of site fences that function as two interconnected plaques, forming a visual constellation based on the narratives of representation from institutions (left side) and private spaces (right side) that can bedescribed as «the afterlife of colonialism».