Berlin, We Who Believed — Initiation Memo
A physical chapter of the ongoing Sabastian Sawe field study.
Study question: what happens when an ongoing field study becomes physical? During Berlin Marathon week, key elements of VRD’s year-long embedded study with Sabastian Sawe are intended to be brought into a physical space for the first time.
01 Origin
Berlin, We Who Believed will bring together photography, moving image, race data, scientific material and a live drawing apparatus. It will exist within The Science of Sawe, a wider temporary exhibition focused on the people, systems and work surrounding the pursuit of 1:59:30.
This is not intended as a summary of the story, nor as a preview of something still to come. It is intended as a point within the story where material accumulated over the previous year can temporarily leave the archive and occupy physical space.
The initiation begins with a need to make parts of the Sub Two study visible before the wider work is complete.
Across the year, the study has accumulated footage, photographs, race data, scientific records, field notes and conversations around Sabastian Sawe’s pursuit of the two-hour marathon and the 1:59:30 achieved in London.
What remains is larger than the result.
There are people who believed before there was evidence to support that belief. Systems built around training, nutrition, physiology, equipment and recovery. Doubts, adjustments and decisions that risk disappearing once the clock stops.
Berlin offers an opportunity to hold some of that material still.
The work is intended to enter a wider exhibition, The Science of Sawe, where the physical and scientific systems surrounding the attempt can sit alongside the photographic and emotional record gathered through the study.
02 The study becomes physical
The Berlin installation is not intended to be a gallery version of the finished project.
It should be one chapter of an ongoing field study expressed physically.
Photography will occupy the walls. Scientific objects and records should give evidence of systems behind the performance. Moving image should return voices and movement to the room. Race data will be removed from the screen and slowly redrawn in ink.
These elements should not need to explain one another.
Together they should allow the same story to be encountered at different speeds.
A photograph can be read immediately or studied for longer. A film asks someone to remain with it. An artefact carries evidence of a process that has already happened. The plotter should make the visitor wait while the image comes into existence.
03 We Who Believed
The Berlin-specific film, We Who Believed, is intended to sit at the centre of this chapter.
Built from material gathered across the wider study and reflections recorded after London, the film should look back at the attempt through those who were close enough to believe it might happen.
It should not function as a trailer for the longer film.
It should exist as its own record of that moment.
The achievement is already known. The question becomes what existed before certainty: who believed, why they believed, what they saw developing, and what it meant when an idea that had lived largely in conversation became 1:59:30.
The voices should matter as much as the information they carry. Pauses, cadence, uncertainty, humour and emotion should remain part of the record.
Within the installation, the image should remain public while listening can become private. Visitors will be able to hear the film through their own phone and headphones using a local listening system built specifically for the space.
The technical build, synchronisation method, network boundary and operating procedure are recorded in Appendix B.
04 Data portrait and pen plotter
Alongside the film, a coded portrait of Sabastian Sawe is intended to be drawn live by an iDraw H A3 pen plotter.
The portrait is built from single-stroke ASCII glyphs. Race information, splits and other recorded data occupy the same field of ink as the face.
A data portrait should take time.
Sabastian’s 1:59:30 is treated not only as a performance measurement but as 7,170 seconds of physical duration.
Rather than producing the image immediately, the apparatus should move one pen across one sheet for approximately the amount of time the marathon took.
The drawing should therefore become an event.
At any point during the process the portrait will be incomplete. The visitor should encounter what has already happened, what remains, and the movement between the two.
Each completed sheet should receive a unique serial as its final ink.
The apparatus, coordinate system, timing logic and operator procedure are recorded in Appendix A.
05 One study, different forms
Berlin is intended to bring together material that normally lives separately.
photography / voice / film / science / race data / code / ink / time
None should provide the definitive account.
The film should give the attempt a voice. The photographs should hold moments that would otherwise disappear. Scientific material should expose some of the systems operating beneath the visible performance. The plotter should give duration a physical body in the room.
Their relationship should not be illustrative. One should not exist to prove or explain another.
They should become different encounters with the same ongoing field study.
This matters because the story of 1:59:30 can easily collapse into the number itself.
06 How would we consider this successful
The installation is intended to remain observational. Success should not be understood through attendance alone.
Instead, the room gives us a set of questions to test:
> Does the work feel like a chapter with its own identity while remaining connected to the wider Sabastian Sawe field study?
> Can photography, science, film and data occupy the same room without one becoming an explanation for the others?
> Can We Who Believed function as a complete work rather than a preview?
> Can the voices preserve something of what it felt like to be inside the attempt before its outcome was known?
> Can private listening create intimacy without creating unnecessary friction?
> Can the plotter make 1:59:30 perceptible as duration rather than simply displaying it as data?
> Can the scientific material reveal process without reducing the human story to measurement?
> Can a visitor enter through one element of the installation and become curious about another?
> Can the work allow the achievement to become larger, rather than smaller, as more of the systems behind it are revealed?
These questions should be considered through what happens in the room: what people notice, what they stay with, what they return to, and what questions remain when they leave.
The intention is not to produce a single reading of Sabastian Sawe or of 1:59:30.
It is to preserve the complexity around an achievement that can otherwise be reduced to eight characters on a clock.