Entstaubung is a GPS-based soundwalk by architect, sound artist and composer Nathalie Brum, created in Marl, Germany, a former coal-mining city. The work explores the act of filtering as both an industrial process and a metaphor for how we navigate memory, identity and everyday life.Brum recorded the sounds of a local factory producing industrial filters for worldwide export, transforming and filtering these recordings into an immersive, ambient and subtly subversive soundscape. Along the route, voices emerge in response to questions such as: What do you filter in life? Have you ever dug something out of the deep? Do you work in the dark?The answers—gathered from people aged 12 to 90—range from a woman uncovering her grandfather’s Nazi past, to a young person filtering hateful comments on Instagram, to a girl filtering her face on TikTok. The anonymous testimonies are recited by Brum in her own voice, allowing individual stories to become part of a shared sonic landscape.Entstaubung turns the city itself into an archive, unearthing hidden sediments of lived experience and bringing memories, voices and histories from the depths to the surface.It is a unique archive of multigenerational memory, where personal stories intersect with both local and global, shared histories. The vastness of the world unfolds through intimate, seemingly insignificant details. Aesthetically abstract yet deeply personal, the soundwalk becomes a psychoanalytical space in which buried memories and histories rise to the surface.

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