This text is a reflective conference report written in response to the EKWS Tagung 2025 (Retelling and Reenacting), which unfolded as a methodological “laboratory” for narrative practices rather than a conventional academic meeting. Instead of documenting panels chronologically, the essay treats the conference as a dispositif of sense-making—tracking how storytelling emerges through positionality, mediality, and competing temporalities.

Moving between the Museum der Kulturen Basel, urban walking practices, a writing workshop, and theatre, the essay develops an argument about retelling as a cultural condition: narration is never neutral, but always shaped by frames, paratexts, embodied rhythms, and institutional voice. It reads exhibitions and public space as montage apparatuses—structures that distribute visibility and legitimacy through selection, omission, and modes of address.

In its final movement, the text explicitly bridges to my research on biraciality and digital image cultures (TikTok/Instagram), where algorithmic “curation,” caption paratexts, looped formats, and platform logics re-stage similar struggles over representation, recognition, and ethical narration. Across settings, the essay proposes four analytic coordinates—retelling, reenacting, reclaiming, renaming—as a methodological compass for thinking cultural power, voice, and responsibility.