Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin

The APRA Foundation Berlin was established in order to protect, preserve and offer public access to APRA, for the benefit of those students, scholars, curators, collectors, writers, and members of the general APRA Foundation Berlin for Multi-Diciplinarity public who have a constructive curiosity or scholarly or professional interest in Piper's work and life. APRA is maintained as a document of Piper's activities in her three chosen areas of specialization: art, philosophy and yoga. The APRA Foundation Berlin supports research that exemplifies, models, analyzes, and/or theorizes the creative multi-disciplinary expressions of the self encouraged by globalization and cross-cultural journeying.

The purpose of the APRA Foundation Berlin is fourfold:

1. to promote a fuller and clearer understanding of Piper's work in each one of these areas and to contribute over the long term to a more accurate, balanced, and complete comprehension of the conditions of production of Piper's entire body of work as a unified whole, through the demonstration and documentation of their interconnection and unity in the environment, personal circumstances, and history of Piper's daily life;

2. to encourage those constructively interested researchers who are understandably reluctant to intrude on Piper's privacy to visit APRA in order to seek in-depth answers to their art-critical, philosophical, or biographical queries;

3. to offer valuable resources, support, and/or collaboration to curators, dealers, writers, or institutions wishing to exhibit, sell or publish Piper's work;

4. to promote further research on the themes and preoccupations that stand at the center of all of Piper’s work in her three chosen areas of specialization.

Adrian Piper, Escape to Berlin: A Travel Memoir, © Adrian Piper

In 2005 Adrian Piper secretly emigrated from the United States. Several months passed before anyone realized she had disappeared. She resurfaced in Berlin and has lived there ever since. Piper has consistently and firmly refused to return to the U.S. or explain why she left. Many assume it was because she discovered her name on the U.S. Department of Transportation Security’s Suspicious Travelers Watch List. Others point to Wellesley College’s forcible termination of her tenured Full Professorship. Yet others speculate that George W. Bush’s presidency, or American racism, or the invasion of Iraq compelled her to leave. All of these conjectures are groundless. ESCAPE TO BERLIN: A Travel Memoir is a gripping autobiographical narrative that provides a full account of the facts.

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