The Hiking Club: A Vocabulary of Yearning
The Hiking Club: A Vocabulary of Yearning centers around a displacement narrative and subsequent feelings of longing that can arise from the immigrant experience. The discovery of a photo album Simmel’s father brought over from Germany picturing the wanderings of his hiking club throughout the forests surrounding Berlin and greater Germany prompted this visual inquiry. The works in The Hiking Club: A Vocabulary of Yearning explore personal and cultural connections between landscape, memory, and history. They intertwine the story of being the daughter of an immigrant with the sublime in nature. The works are in part homage to landscapes, trees and the histories they’ve lived through, as well as Simmel’s immigrant father and the time in which he lived. Simmel has always been interested in how events that we do not experience directly nevertheless color our normalcy. We inherit intergenerational trauma; we become “infected” by the hopes and inspirations of our predecessors.
This project has been a way to deal with a history muted by unspoken stories. For the artist, the work reveals the process of unraveling the burden of history that defines her and presents an investigation into intergenerational cultural identity, loss, and renewal.