Topographies of Memory: Casting with Paper
Topography of Memory:
Paper, Casting, and the Archaeology of Form
Mold making has always been with paper, though we rarely pause to see it. Even the humble sheet — that flat, familiar surface on which we write and print — is itself the result of casting. Pulp is poured into a frame, pressed, and dried; the mold releases its impression, leaving behind what we simply call paper. We accept it as ordinary, forgetting that each sheet is a cast, a negative space translated into surface. To speak of paper casting, then, is not to introduce something new, but to return to an ancient truth: that every act of paper making is already an act of mold, memory, and release. What changes is only our attention, our willingness to recognize paper not as neutral background but as an active witness, a skin of form, a vessel of memory.
Paper Beyond the Page
Paper is so deeply woven into human life that we often overlook it. It is taken as neutral — a surface for writing, a support for images, a tool for wrapping or storing. It disappears behind what it carries. Yet before it serves as a backdrop, paper already holds meaning. At its core lies cellulose, the most abundant organic compound on earth, found in the walls of every plant cell. This humble molecule is what gives paper its tensile strength, its flexibility, and its astonishing capacity to bond.
Paper bonds only to itself. It does not cling to stone, glass, or metal; it does not fuse with bark, fabric, or plastic. It forms cohesion only through the entanglement of its own fibers. This unique property sets it apart from plaster, wax, or clay and makes it one of the most radical casting materials in existence. If plaster fixes form by embracing its mold, paper releases itself. If bronze monumentalizes, paper whispers.
This paradox has been central to my research: paper’s refusal to bond outward makes it infinitely open. Anything can serve as its mold. A tree trunk, a porcelain plate, a shoe, a leaf, even the pocked surface of the moon — all can leave their impression. Paper receives form without resistance, drying into fragile skins that preserve not just texture but memory.
Unlike traditional papermaking, where the goal is functional sheets — strong, uniform, durable — paper casting moves toward something else. It is not about permanence but about presence. It produces not pages but skins of memory, thin and delicate, carrying the traces of what they have touched. Paper casting transforms paper from a background into a protagonist: no longer a vessel for inscription, but an inscription itself.
Memory and the Act of Copying
To cast is to copy, but copying is never neutral. Each cast is a translation from positive to negative and back again, and each translation introduces loss, distortion, and reinterpretation. Yet in this loss, memory takes form.
The history of casting is deeply tied to the history of remembering. The plaster bodies at Pompeii, created when voids in volcanic ash were filled centuries later, preserve not only anatomical forms but gestures of final breath. Death masks — taken from rulers, artists, and poets — attempted to secure a likeness for eternity. Fossils, in their stony way, are also casts, preserving impressions of vanished lives.
Paper casting belongs to this lineage but shifts the tone. Where plaster hardens, paper shrinks. Where bronze seeks eternity, paper accepts fragility. For me, the cast in paper is not a quest for permanence but for what I call an archaeology of touch.
When I cast with paper, I sometimes achieve breathtaking precision: every groove of bark, every hairline crack, every grain of a woven fabric. But I am not always seeking perfect replicas. Often what interests me are the collapsed edges, the wrinkles, the overlooked fragments, the scars of time. Paper transforms copying into remembering. It does not merely replicate; it reimagines. The cast remembers, but it also transforms.
This difference matters. Memory itself is not permanent. It shrinks, wrinkles, fades. It carries traces and distortions rather than perfect images. To cast in paper is to materialize this fragile, unstable nature of memory. The fragility of paper is not a weakness but an honesty.
Positive and Negative Space
Casting requires us to think in terms of positive and negative space. The positive is the object: the thing itself. The negative is the hollow it leaves. One becomes the other.
In sculpture, this dialectic is as old as the medium. Rachel Whiteread has shown it with eloquence in her casts of interiors, staircases, and bookshelves — voids transformed into solids, emptiness turned monumental. Giuseppe Penone, in the tradition of Arte Povera, has cast bark, breath, and even the imprint of his own body, showing that absence is as alive as presence. In theater, Peter Brook’s The Empty Space reminds us that emptiness is not nothingness but potential, waiting for activation.
Paper casting brings this dialogue into a fragile register. When pulp is pressed inside a mask, what emerges is not the mask but the ghost of a face. When pulp coats the inside of a bowl, it remembers containment rather than the vessel itself. The act of copying becomes a meditation on the space between presence and absence.
In my work, this meditation often guides the choice of what to cast. A blister pack does not only hold tablets; it holds absence once they are gone. A woven hat holds the memory of a head it once covered. A sign pressed from the back shows smoothness rather than embossed letters. Casting in paper foregrounds what is missing as much as what is present. It insists that memory is shaped by voids as well as by fullness.
Paper and Fabric: Divergent Skins
Though both paper and fabric begin with cellulose, they diverge in process and in destiny.
Fabric arises from continuity. Plant fibers are brushed, carded, spun into threads, and woven into cloth. Its strength lies in this continuous weave. It clothes us, wraps us, shelters us. It moves with the body and survives through flexibility.
Paper, by contrast, arises from discontinuity. Plant fibers are beaten until they separate, suspended in water, then allowed to bond anew as they dry. Its strength lies in this re-encounter of brokenness. Paper holds imprints and records gestures; it stiffens into memory rather than flowing into movement.
Metaphorically, fabric belongs to the living body, paper to the archive. Fabric protects; paper records. Fabric is woven time; paper is sedimented time.
In casting, this divergence becomes particularly clear. Fabric yields to the body; paper yields to form. Paper’s strength is in becoming a skin that remembers — fragile yet precise, able to carry detail without needing continuity. It reminds us that strength can come from fracture as well as from weave.
Experiments: Archaeologies of the Everyday
Perhaps the most radical principle of paper casting is its simplicity: paper bonds only to itself. Because of this, every material — wood, stone, plastic, glass, textiles, leaves, food, metal — can serve as a mold.
This property turns the entire world into potential terrain for casting. A rock, a biscuit, a blister pack, the bark of a cork tree, the weave of a carpet, the curve of a glass bowl — all can leave their mark. Paper accepts them without resistance, drying into delicate skins that carry both precision and imperfection.
In this sense, paper casting becomes an archaeology of the everyday. We need not seek grand monuments or precious relics. We can cast what surrounds us, what is most overlooked. In the texture of a biscuit lies a map of fragility. In the plastic ridges of packaging lies a record of consumer life. In the weave of a hat lies a memory of protection.
This universality makes paper casting both democratic and poetic. It transforms the overlooked into evidence, the banal into artifact. It shows us that memory is not only stored in archives or museums, but in every surface we touch. Each cast becomes a fragment of an atlas of daily life — a topography of memory that preserves not objects but the traces they leave.
Topographies of Memory
Topography is the mapping of terrain: ridges, craters, valleys, scars. Memory, too, has its topography. It is not flat but folded, not continuous but broken. It is marked by scars of experience, by absences and eruptions.
Paper casting allows us to chart this terrain. When I cast the surface of the moon, I think of it as skin. Every crater is a scar, every impact a wound that never heals. The moon, visible yet unreachable, is like memory itself — scarred by everything that has ever touched it, incapable of forgetting.
The casts I make are not literal maps. They are not cartographic. They are instead fragments of terrain: a mask, a tree bark, a blister pack, a biscuit. Each becomes a section of a larger atlas of memory. Together, they chart an emotional and material geography: a cartography of scars, a topography of absence.
Here lies the core of what I call Topographies of Memory. Paper casting does not monumentalize. It maps. It charts the fragile surface of life, showing where it has been pressed, folded, eroded. It does not erase fragility; it makes fragility visible.
Fragility as Counter-Monument
Monuments, in stone or bronze, claim permanence. They freeze memory into eternity, imposing themselves on the future. But memory is not eternal. It shifts, fades, collapses. To pretend otherwise is to betray it.
Paper embraces this fragility. A cast in paper does not claim to last forever. It offers itself to time, knowing it may wrinkle, shrink, or tear. In doing so, it speaks more honestly of memory than marble ever could.
This fragility aligns paper casting with what some call counter-monuments: works that commemorate not by asserting permanence, but by exposing vulnerability. Doris Salcedo’s installations, made from fragile furniture or petals, remind us that grief cannot be monumentalized. Arte Povera artists embraced materials that decay, resisting the logic of permanence.
Paper joins this lineage. Its weakness is not a failure but a form of testimony. A paper cast is not a claim to immortality but a record of presence. It commemorates by vanishing, by showing that memory is always provisional.
A Lab State of Mind
At Paper Lab Berlin, I often speak of a lab state of mind. To work with paper is not to follow fixed recipes but to experiment, to fail, to repeat.
Creativity, for me, is problem-solving. Each cast poses a question: how to release it, how to preserve detail, how to balance fragility and strength. Each failure teaches something new. Repetition is essential: by casting again and again, we learn not only techniques but intuitions.
The lab is not a factory for perfect results. It is a space for dialogue: between paper and mold, between absence and presence, between memory and forgetting. It is a space where failure is not defeat but data. Every wrinkle, every tear, every collapse tells us how paper behaves.
This ethos extends beyond the studio. It is an approach to life. Stop asking “how much” — start experimenting. Stop looking for confirmation — start listening to your material. Each experiment is a conversation, a reflection of ideas and questions carried inside. Paper teaches us to embrace fragility, to document ourselves, to learn through touch and destruction.
Conclusion: Casting as Memory, Casting as Invitation
To work with paper casting is, at its heart, to engage with memory. But it is not memory in the monumental sense — not statues, not bronze plaques, not marble epitaphs. It is memory as fragile presence, as thin as a skin, as fleeting as a breath pressed into matter. Paper casting teaches us that to remember is not to preserve forever but to trace, to mark, to carry a scar that may fade yet never fully disappear.
For those within the arts, this realization resonates with the language of form, of material, of gesture. Yet the invitation of paper casting extends far beyond the studio. Paper is not only the artist’s tool. It belongs to everyone. It is the substance of our lives: from the notebooks of scientists to the ledgers of economists, from the books of poets to the packaging that wraps our food. To cast in paper is not only to make art — it is to enter into dialogue with one of the most universal materials we know.
For educators, paper casting offers a way to teach observation, patience, and the delicate balance of trial and error. Children who cast the bark of a tree or the texture of a leaf discover that learning is not only about reading or calculation but about touch, attention, and care. For scientists, the act of casting can serve as an analogue to the processes of replication and preservation: it demonstrates how a material can hold form without merging with it, how cellulose — the most abundant organic polymer on Earth — carries both precision and fragility in equal measure. For those in design or architecture, paper casting presents a method of capturing surfaces, volumes, and negative spaces without relying on digital scanning or industrial replication, offering instead a low-tech, tactile technology of remembering.
And for those who approach not through discipline but through life itself, paper casting can be a practice of reflection. Casting a blister pack after the tablets have been taken becomes a meditation on health, aging, and absence. Casting a shoe or a hat becomes a way of remembering the body that once wore it. Casting the surface of a bowl or a piece of fruit becomes a way of contemplating consumption, nourishment, and the traces of the everyday.
What makes paper particularly radical in this context is that it does not require advanced equipment, expensive materials, or rare tools. Paper can be made from almost anything — from plant fibers, recycled fabrics, kitchen scraps, or synthetic blends. It is democratic, humble, and ubiquitous. Yet when we engage it through casting, it becomes something profound: a medium that allows us to copy the world not as permanence, but as vulnerability. It asks us to notice what is often overlooked, to preserve what is often discarded, to transform absence into presence.
In this sense, paper casting is not a niche technique but a philosophy of attention. It is a way of slowing down in a culture that accelerates. It is a way of attending to surfaces, to the fragile textures of life, rather than rushing toward outcomes. It is a way of working with what is available, of learning that fragility does not mean weakness but truth.
And perhaps most importantly, paper casting reminds us that memory is not fixed. It shrinks, warps, wrinkles, and collapses — just like the skins of paper. What we hold in our hands is never the thing itself but its trace, its echo, its scar. And this is enough. In fact, this is everything.
So this is my invitation: whether you are an artist, a researcher, a teacher, a scientist, or simply someone who has never thought of paper beyond the page — try it. Take a surface, a leaf, a bowl, a fragment of your life. Cast it in paper. Let it dry. Hold it in your hands. What you will discover is not just texture, not just form, but a way of seeing memory itself. A way of holding on without grasping too tightly. A way of remembering that to copy is not to steal but to honor.
Paper casting, in the end, is not about results but about relation. It is about what happens when material, memory, and touch meet in fragile skins. It is about learning to see again, to touch again, to recognize that every surface we encounter holds a story waiting to be carried.
And in that fragile cast — as thin as skin, as temporary as paper — we glimpse the possibility of an art that belongs to everyone.