Meisterschüler SoSe 2026
I Don’t Know How Many Souls I Have
I Don’t Know How Many Souls I Have is a transmedia installation, grounded in a poetic video game that reflects on the thresholds we inhabit through loss.
My intimate encounter with crisis became the catalyst for a broader investigation into how worlds, both internal and external, are created, distorted and remade.
This experience is constructed starting from the separation from my mentor – a Burmese artist – during the violent, still ongoing war in Myanmar, and my father’s stroke, which left him temporarily unable to recall his own memories. My losses, illnesses, the wider political ruptures and instability, all exist within a liminal state. In this condition individuals and societies are suspended between what has been and what is yet to come. Those living through war, displacement, or profound personal upheaval inhabit this condition most intensely, as their lives remain caught in an unresolved, transitional reality.
The game’s environments are built two ways: from physical models made in the studio and scanned into digital space, and from field recordings — photography, sound, video, 360º footage, LiDAR scans — gathered in extended periods of residency and research journeys through sacred territories marked by conflict in Myanmar and the Indian Himalayas.
The first on-site study consisted of a 2019 motorbike expedition undertaken with my mentor from Yangon to Nat Ma Taung in Chin State, through regions that have since been irrevocably altered. The journey was made possible by people along the route — guides, hosts, strangers — many of whom have since perished in the conflict that followed. The area has since become a war zone, off-limits and severely affected by fighting between Chin resistance forces and the military junta.
The second journey, in May 2023, took me across Uttarakhand on the Chota Char Dham, a route between four sacred sites traditionally undertaken late in life, associated with liberation and the approach of death. The project focuses particularly on the Tapovan–Gomukh–Gangotri corridor. This broader region is shaped by long-standing border disputes between India, China and Nepal. Here, sacred routes intersect with militarised, contested terrain. In two different ways, these are landscapes of conflict and death.
The title, borrowed from Fernando Pessoa’s poem, speaks to the fragmentation of self at the heart of the work. Drawing from spiritual “death texts” such as the Bardo Thodol and the Garuda Purana, and allegorical journeys like Dante’s Divine Comedy, you become a soul with no memory, wandering the world of the dead in search of a teacher already gone. You help them piece their memories back together and meet the beings that inhabit this world along the way. The interactive single-player videogame was developed in collaboration with Federico Zurani, Edoardo Bracchi and Leon Eckard.
TECHNICAL
I Don’t Know How Many Souls I Have, 2026. Interactive single-player video-game installation; real-time game engine, projection, generative video, spatial sound; media sculptures ensemble, iron, bamboo, electronics, variable dimensions.
SUPERVISION
Prof. Alberto de Campo & Prof. Nina Fischer
Photography: Misha Voropaev
