The Stories of a Silent City.
We give Munich's sculptures back their voice — briefly, in the first person, for a ten-year-old child. No app. No QR code. The sculpture itself is the trigger.
A craft, not a product.
Munich is full of sculptures that carry stories. The lions outside the Residenz, the dragon on the Town Hall, the Fischbrunnen, the Wittelsbacher Brunnen — silent witnesses that millions of people pass each year without ever learning what they have to say.
UrbanTales gives these figures their voices back. A child holds their parents' phone up to the lion outside the Residenz. The lion stirs, breathes, and tells its story for forty seconds — in the first person, in language that a ten-year-old understands and won't forget.
No sign-up. No download. No QR code on the wall. The sculpture itself is the trigger. What a child learns, they learn through the story, not in spite of it.
We're not building this as a city guide. Not as a game. Not as an app. We're building it as a craft — at the intersection of curatorial work, narrative care, and new technology. With the institutions that have looked after these figures for decades.
The Lion of Prudence awakens.
Outside the Munich Residenz stand four bronze lions, cast around 1595 in the workshop of Hubert Gerhard, Carlo Pallago, and Hans Krumpper for an unrealized Wittelsbach tomb — each embodying a princely virtue: Strength, Justice, Temperance, and Prudence. They have guarded the Residenz portals since 1616. The Lion of Prudence carries a legend of good fortune that has lived among Münchners for generations — and hardly anyone knows it.
With a smartphone and forty seconds of attention, the lion tells his story himself. Six more sculptures along the old-town route will follow — seven stations, one curated Munich narrative.
These figures are not silent because they have nothing to say. They are silent because we have forgotten how to ask.
Read the full manifesto →With the keepers, not for them.
UrbanTales is in conversation with curators, museums, schools, and city institutions that want to open their collections and monuments to a new generation — in a way that honours the substance of these figures.
If you would like to follow the project, contribute your own content, or explore a pilot at your institution, I'd be glad to hear from you.