With Mapping the Rural, I am examining the remnants of my family’s pre (and post) WWII Barn (Lower Austrian German: ‘der Stadl’) which was demolished in 2023 after several attempts of saving the building. The deconstruction coincided with my father’s aggressive neurodegenerative illness and thus emerged as a ‘Sinnbild’, a representation, of memory loss and the transformation of identity. I am now ‘reconstructing’ the Barn via its remaining protagonist, a manually built circular saw (‘die Kreissäge’) and further characters such as an old-school Austrian scythe, a metal-ringed wooden flail, and a hand-bound hazel broom to (re-)imagine my family’s heritage in a wider national context, and to forge a method set for a new speculative and historical narrative-focussed examination of transient place.

What will this place become?

What remains?