Monuments, Voids and Voices #2 A Place for Otherwise — The Märchenbrunnen

Authors: Meital Herbst and Milena Szmukler

This project proposes an audio walk as a non-formal pedagogical device that activates public space as a site of sensitive, affective, and reflective learning. Centered on the Fairy Tale Fountain, it approaches the fountain not only as a historical monument, but as a territory of memory, imagination, and cultural transmission. Conceived at the beginning of the twentieth century as a space dedicated to urban childhood in a context of industrialization, it embodies a cultural vision that recognized storytelling, play, and imagination as essential dimensions of human development. The incorporation of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm into its sculptural program reflects a policy that valued narrative as a formative practice.

The audio walk offers a contemporary reinterpretation of this original intention by shifting the focus from childhood to adult experience. In contemporary urban societies, imagination is frequently marginalized or subordinated to logics of productivity and efficiency. This project understands imagination as a political and cultural capacity that enables the envisioning of alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Through a sonic narrative, the walk creates a contrast between the accelerated rhythm of adult urban life and the experience of pause generated by the encounter with the fountain.

This transition functions pedagogically by inviting participants to engage in attentive listening, to reactivate affective memories linked to childhood, and to reconnect with the experience of being narrated to and of narrating in return. Memory is approached not as the accumulation of historical information, but as an embodied and emotional process activated through sound, space, and storytelling. The Fountain operates as a symbolic bridge between past and present, childhood and adulthood, reality and imagination.

Finally, the project positions itself as a gesture of contemporary cultural practice that affirms imagination as a legitimate dimension of adulthood, opening a reflective field rather than offering closed interpretations.