Mother Tongue is an artist book from a year-and-a-half-long investigation within the Oceania Collection of the Linden-Museum Stuttgart. It probes the possibility of artistic fieldwork as a critical and creative methodology—one that not only engages with an ethnographic collection, but also interrogates its status, legacy, and future. 
The book is structured as a journal de bord—a travelogue or field journal—documenting the research as it unfolds. It is interwoven with archival materials, photographs, and reflections, forming an intimate narrative that allows the viewer/reader to witness the process. The journey is not just one of knowledge, but one of engagement with the unseen, the lost, and the silenced.
Mother Tongue stretches beyond the confines of the museum, bridging the colonial past with the present through the lens of a living language community. It connects to Unserdeutsch, a German-based Creole language and community from New Britain Island. In doing so, it fosters a form of cultural repatriation—not of objects, but of language and memory.

These four prints bear witness to the absent presence of cultural artifacts—an absence deeply felt within ethnographic collections, and here, specifically within the Oceania Collection of the Linden-Museum Stuttgart. Each print focuses on a single cultural object from Papua New Guinea, representing four distinct language groups. Acquired at the beginning of the 20th century, these objects have since “disappeared”: though their inventory numbers remain, no trace of their physical presence exists within the museum’s holdings. What, then, survives?
Several theories have been proposed. The most plausible, according to the current curator, is that they were destroyed in the 1944 fire that devastated parts of the museum during the Second World War.

A Grammar of Absence presents descriptions written by the curator of the Oceania Collection in both English and German, based on the only remaining evidence of these artifacts: a few grainy silver gelatin photographs. Departing from the conventions of museum labelling, Sandler invited the curator to write beyond the merely factual, producing texts that blend expertise with careful restraint—avoiding speculation while offering as rich a cultural context as possible.

Each poster carries a quiet acknowledgement: none of these objects remain. Their material forms are lost. What endures are fragments—photographic textures, archival shadows, and considered words.