Standing in front of a cinema screen, Karolin Meunier places herself between the images and words to dig into the motley life of American actress, scriptwriter, and filmmaker Barbara Loden. The performance Aller-retour et aller is built upon the power of reactivating one’s life through that of someone else’s – something quite different from merely mimicking, imitating, or stealing from another person’s identity. When Loden claims »I am Wanda«, she is already disappearing into, or rather reemerging from two different characters: the protagonist of her film Wanda (1970) and Alma Malone, a woman arrested in 1960 in connection with a failed bank robbery, who inspired Loden’s film. The way for Meunier to retrace Loden’s desire to finally become herself by embodying Wanda is to engage in dialogue with other women whose stories have intentionally or just by chance encountered that of Loden/Wanda. As the French writer Nathalie Léger discovered during her long journey in the tracks of the filmmaker, Loden slips away every time we think to have reached a conclusion about her life; she/Wanda wanders and takes the shape of someone else’s unsettled desires. Weaving a net of intersected, yet somewhat extraneous-to-each-other stories, therefore, proves to be a generative research method by which to grasp Loden’s movements and metamorphosis: Meunier’s writing; her conversation with a friend; the photographs her mother took when she travelled to Pennsylvania in 1960… As Léger observes in her Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden (2012), seemingly unfamiliar spaces are the very contexts in which we can perceive with clarity the not-yet-emerged parts of our existence. (Clio Nicastro, »The Possibility of a Return«, in: Karolin Meunier, Aller-retour et aller, HaFI 017, Berlin 2023)