There are certain television series we do not simply watch. We return to them. Again and again, over years, sometimes over decades, as if revisiting a familiar street, an old room, or the voice of someone we once loved.
For me, Columbo is one of those places.
People often ask why anyone would repeatedly watch the same episodes while already knowing the ending. But perhaps that is precisely the reason. The mystery is no longer the point. What remains is atmosphere, ritual, memory, and a strange kind of emotional shelter.
When I watch Columbo, I am no longer only sitting in my apartment in Hamburg. Part of me returns to our beautiful house in my hometown, where as a child I watched those episodes on our black-and-white Shaw Lorenz television set. I can still remember the texture of the room, the evening light, the quiet concentration of family life unfolding around the screen.
The television itself now feels like an artifact of memory, a vessel carrying fragments of another time.
Before I understood art, landscape, textiles, or the language of materials, there were already images quietly shaping me: the soft monochrome glow of late-night television, the slow and observant presence of Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo, the rhythm of conversation, silence, and careful attention to detail.
Perhaps this is why I am drawn today to felt, fabric, memory, and handmade objects. I have come to believe that objects absorb emotional life. A carpet, a vessel, a handbag, a television set, they become containers of lived experience. They hold voices, gestures, atmospheres, and traces of people long after moments have passed.
Memory rarely returns as a sharp image. It comes back softly, like black-and-white television itself: blurred edges, shadows, familiar sounds, and feelings stronger than facts.
Watching Columbo now feels less like watching a detective series and more like entering a personal archive.
An archive of childhood.
Of home.
Of safety.
Of time that can never fully disappear.