Re: [-empyre-] Monika Weiss -- Shrouds, 2012-2013 (as addendum to Lamentation)
Beautiful text, Monika! When I was a child (I was a very precocius reader :) and read history of Rome and Greece. My favorite was the history of Carthage and I was shocked how the city was erased and the Romans threw salt in it to avoid the Carthagineses should build it again. These horrible fate of a city was a nightmare for me and I asked my grandfather if our city could have the same fate and my grandfather tranquilized me, it happened in the old times, nothing similar could happen now. But he was wrong and he wanted spare me the grief, of course. I visited the city of Guernica in Spain some years ago and I tried to imagine the eerie atmosphere of the city when the fascist bombs fell over the city. It was these atmosphere the thing Picasso tried to paint in his painture. I searched the city of Guernica trying to evoke the day when the city's heart was ravaged. And what about the mourning today? It was a planted tree and a post telling the day and the time of the attack. Nothing more. Ana On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: From a text I wrote about my current ongoing this year project Shrouds. Do cities remember? Maps of cities are flat, yet their histories contain vertical strata of events. Where in the topography and consciousness of a city can we locate its memory? Maps of the Polish city Zielona Góra depict an empty unmarked rectangular area located on Wrocławska Street, across from the Focus Park shopping mall. Located centrally within the city this area looks abandoned, being composed mostly of broken masonry and wood debris. Inquiries to citizens of Zielona Góra indicate that many of them do not know the history of this abandoned area, including those who grew up near the site. Invited by a local museum to propose a project, I arrived to Zielona Góra (Gruenberg) knowing of the past history of the unmarked yet centrally located ruined site. On June 9th this year I flew on a small airplane to film this territory and its surroundings. The flight marked the beginning of my new project that will eventually develop into a film and a multi-layered dialogue with the citizens of Zielona Góra. During the Second World War the site was a forced labor camp, which later became a concentration camp designated primarily for Jewish women. The camp was developed on the site of the German wool factory, Deutsche Wollenwaren Manufaktur AG, which supplied the German war machine with military clothing. (It has since been converted to a shopping mall.) During the war about 1,000 young women worked there as seamstresses and eventually became prisoners of the concentration camp complex governed by KZ Groß-Rosen. Towards the very end of the war the prisoners were sent on one of the most tragic of the forced Death Marches where many of them died. Looking down from the airplane we see well-kept buildings surrounding the ruins of the former camp, as though it were an open yet forgotten wound in the body of the center of the city. During the performative phase of the project, I invited a group of young women from Zielona Góra to spend some time in silence on the site of the camp, wearing black scarfs which later were taken off and left behind amongst the ruins. Their presence evoked the absence of the prisoners. In the dual video projection installation at the BWA, (an exhibition that initiated the project in June), the faces of these young women look towards us in silence. In another part of the projection we observe a torso of a woman wrapping bandages onto her naked chest in a slow, fragile gesture of defense, or perhaps caress. Her body stands for our common body, anonymous as if it were a membrane between the self and the external world. Awareness of our marginality becomes elevated into the realm of meaning through our brief encounter with memory and history. “Shrouds” considers aspects of public memory and amnesia in the construction of the space of a city and its urban planning. As part of this project, citizens of Zielona Góra are invited to propose how we choose to remember, (or not) the women prisoners who perished there, and how this fulfilled the goals of a systematic destruction of an entire population. Over the course of this year citizens of Zielona Gora are also invited to respond to a questionnaire in order to propose their own ideas for the development of the area, whether as a site of commemoration, or through other forms of dialogue. Earlier this year, after over 50 years of gradual decay and abandonment, the site has been sold by the city's officials to an undisclosed developer. Yet the larger debate in Zielona Gora, a dialogue about the site of the former camp and about the city's memory and amnesia, as well as about the meaning of citizenship and response-ability shall continue, to some extend, thanks to Shrouds. http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1015094644656.448736.179396834655type=3
[-empyre-] Monika Weiss -- Shrouds, 2012-2013 (as addendum to Lamentation)
Today is the real estate and the commerce and the corporate world--- memory of a city does not constitute a value, unless it's a negative value, because it becomes a threat to the powers. Nationalism of any kind does not interest me. Instead, is the redefinition of otherness as sameness. I grew up seeing an empty square of ground located centrally in my own city of Warsaw, which used to be a royal castle. After 1945 Soviets prevented Poland from rebuilding the castle, so that there was no national monument to speak of. But in the seventies, when the entire city was up and rebuild from zero to its simulacrum (as you know Germans reduced entire Warsaw to an ocean of rubble by systematically exploding and burning all buildings and bridges while Soviets watched this spectacle from the other side of a a very narrow river of Vistula, during Warsaw Uprising in August 1944) -- When I was growing up in seventies the rubble, gray like our grand zero in 2001, created a stark contrast to the rest of the city, a reverse monument, a whole, a living wound. On Oct 5, 2012, at 7:41 AM, Ana Valdés wrote: Beautiful text, Monika! When I was a child (I was a very precocius reader :) and read history of Rome and Greece. My favorite was the history of Carthage and I was shocked how the city was erased and the Romans threw salt in it to avoid the Carthagineses should build it again. These horrible fate of a city was a nightmare for me and I asked my grandfather if our city could have the same fate and my grandfather tranquilized me, it happened in the old times, nothing similar could happen now. But he was wrong and he wanted spare me the grief, of course. I visited the city of Guernica in Spain some years ago and I tried to imagine the eerie atmosphere of the city when the fascist bombs fell over the city. It was these atmosphere the thing Picasso tried to paint in his painture. I searched the city of Guernica trying to evoke the day when the city's heart was ravaged. And what about the mourning today? It was a planted tree and a post telling the day and the time of the attack. Nothing more. Ana On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: From a text I wrote about my current ongoing this year project Shrouds. Do cities remember? Maps of cities are flat, yet their histories contain vertical strata of events. Where in the topography and consciousness of a city can we locate its memory? Maps of the Polish city Zielona Góra depict an empty unmarked rectangular area located on Wrocławska Street, across from the Focus Park shopping mall. Located centrally within the city this area looks abandoned, being composed mostly of broken masonry and wood debris. Inquiries to citizens of Zielona Góra indicate that many of them do not know the history of this abandoned area, including those who grew up near the site. Invited by a local museum to propose a project, I arrived to Zielona Góra (Gruenberg) knowing of the past history of the unmarked yet centrally located ruined site. On June 9th this year I flew on a small airplane to film this territory and its surroundings. The flight marked the beginning of my new project that will eventually develop into a film and a multi-layered dialogue with the citizens of Zielona Góra. During the Second World War the site was a forced labor camp, which later became a concentration camp designated primarily for Jewish women. The camp was developed on the site of the German wool factory, Deutsche Wollenwaren Manufaktur AG, which supplied the German war machine with military clothing. (It has since been converted to a shopping mall.) During the war about 1,000 young women worked there as seamstresses and eventually became prisoners of the concentration camp complex governed by KZ Groß-Rosen. Towards the very end of the war the prisoners were sent on one of the most tragic of the forced Death Marches where many of them died. Looking down from the airplane we see well-kept buildings surrounding the ruins of the former camp, as though it were an open yet forgotten wound in the body of the center of the city. During the performative phase of the project, I invited a group of young women from Zielona Góra to spend some time in silence on the site of the camp, wearing black scarfs which later were taken off and left behind amongst the ruins. Their presence evoked the absence of the prisoners. In the dual video projection installation at the BWA, (an exhibition that initiated the project in June), the faces of these young women look towards us in silence. In another part of the projection we observe a torso of a woman wrapping bandages onto her naked chest in a slow, fragile gesture of defense, or perhaps caress. Her body stands for our common body, anonymous as if it were a membrane between the self and the external world. Awareness of our marginality becomes elevated into the realm of
Re: [-empyre-] Monika Weiss -- Shrouds, 2012-2013 (as addendum to Lamentation)
A group of friends of mine, the architect group Hackitectura, www.hackitectura.net work with maps and try to make a cartography of the memory (or the lack of it) mapping social relations, inmaterial networks, political issues. One of their main pillars is the work with communities wanting to recover the hidden stories of the cities, the place where the real estate or the market converge with the lives of the people living there. Your remarks about the real state and the commerce and corporate world reminds me about the debate on gentrification and it's consequences. With gentrification the stories of the people are erased, shiny new white surfaces substitute the cracks of the fabric, the holes in the walls, the peeled tiles, the age, the wrinkles of the skin. Ana On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: Today is the real estate and the commerce and the corporate world--- memory of a city does not constitute a value, unless it's a negative value, because it becomes a threat to the powers. Nationalism of any kind does not interest me. Instead, is the redefinition of otherness as sameness. I grew up seeing an empty square of ground located centrally in my own city of Warsaw, which used to be a royal castle. After 1945 Soviets prevented Poland from rebuilding the castle, so that there was no national monument to speak of. But in the seventies, when the entire city was up and rebuild from zero to its simulacrum (as you know Germans reduced entire Warsaw to an ocean of rubble by systematically exploding and burning all buildings and bridges while Soviets watched this spectacle from the other side of a a very narrow river of Vistula, during Warsaw Uprising in August 1944) -- When I was growing up in seventies the rubble, gray like our grand zero in 2001, created a stark contrast to the rest of the city, a reverse monument, a whole, a living wound. On Oct 5, 2012, at 7:41 AM, Ana Valdés wrote: Beautiful text, Monika! When I was a child (I was a very precocius reader :) and read history of Rome and Greece. My favorite was the history of Carthage and I was shocked how the city was erased and the Romans threw salt in it to avoid the Carthagineses should build it again. These horrible fate of a city was a nightmare for me and I asked my grandfather if our city could have the same fate and my grandfather tranquilized me, it happened in the old times, nothing similar could happen now. But he was wrong and he wanted spare me the grief, of course. I visited the city of Guernica in Spain some years ago and I tried to imagine the eerie atmosphere of the city when the fascist bombs fell over the city. It was these atmosphere the thing Picasso tried to paint in his painture. I searched the city of Guernica trying to evoke the day when the city's heart was ravaged. And what about the mourning today? It was a planted tree and a post telling the day and the time of the attack. Nothing more. Ana On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: From a text I wrote about my current ongoing this year project Shrouds. Do cities remember? Maps of cities are flat, yet their histories contain vertical strata of events. Where in the topography and consciousness of a city can we locate its memory? Maps of the Polish city Zielona Góra depict an empty unmarked rectangular area located on Wrocławska Street, across from the Focus Park shopping mall. Located centrally within the city this area looks abandoned, being composed mostly of broken masonry and wood debris. Inquiries to citizens of Zielona Góra indicate that many of them do not know the history of this abandoned area, including those who grew up near the site. Invited by a local museum to propose a project, I arrived to Zielona Góra (Gruenberg) knowing of the past history of the unmarked yet centrally located ruined site. On June 9th this year I flew on a small airplane to film this territory and its surroundings. The flight marked the beginning of my new project that will eventually develop into a film and a multi-layered dialogue with the citizens of Zielona Góra. During the Second World War the site was a forced labor camp, which later became a concentration camp designated primarily for Jewish women. The camp was developed on the site of the German wool factory, Deutsche Wollenwaren Manufaktur AG, which supplied the German war machine with military clothing. (It has since been converted to a shopping mall.) During the war about 1,000 young women worked there as seamstresses and eventually became prisoners of the concentration camp complex governed by KZ Groß-Rosen. Towards the very end of the war the prisoners were sent on one of the most tragic of the forced Death Marches where many of them died. Looking down from the airplane we see well-kept buildings surrounding the ruins of the former camp, as though it
Re: [-empyre-] Monika Weiss -- Shrouds, 2012-2013 (as addendum to Lamentation)
I would love to get in touch with them, if you think possible. This has been and continues to be my main project (in other cities as well) since last year and it would be interesting to consider a collaboration with them, should they be interested. I feel a deep connection to your writing Ana by the way. Monika On Oct 5, 2012, at 8:53 AM, Ana Valdés wrote: A group of friends of mine, the architect group Hackitectura, www.hackitectura.net work with maps and try to make a cartography of the memory (or the lack of it) mapping social relations, inmaterial networks, political issues. One of their main pillars is the work with communities wanting to recover the hidden stories of the cities, the place where the real estate or the market converge with the lives of the people living there. Your remarks about the real state and the commerce and corporate world reminds me about the debate on gentrification and it's consequences. With gentrification the stories of the people are erased, shiny new white surfaces substitute the cracks of the fabric, the holes in the walls, the peeled tiles, the age, the wrinkles of the skin. Ana On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: Today is the real estate and the commerce and the corporate world--- memory of a city does not constitute a value, unless it's a negative value, because it becomes a threat to the powers. Nationalism of any kind does not interest me. Instead, is the redefinition of otherness as sameness. I grew up seeing an empty square of ground located centrally in my own city of Warsaw, which used to be a royal castle. After 1945 Soviets prevented Poland from rebuilding the castle, so that there was no national monument to speak of. But in the seventies, when the entire city was up and rebuild from zero to its simulacrum (as you know Germans reduced entire Warsaw to an ocean of rubble by systematically exploding and burning all buildings and bridges while Soviets watched this spectacle from the other side of a a very narrow river of Vistula, during Warsaw Uprising in August 1944) -- When I was growing up in seventies the rubble, gray like our grand zero in 2001, created a stark contrast to the rest of the city, a reverse monument, a whole, a living wound. On Oct 5, 2012, at 7:41 AM, Ana Valdés wrote: Beautiful text, Monika! When I was a child (I was a very precocius reader :) and read history of Rome and Greece. My favorite was the history of Carthage and I was shocked how the city was erased and the Romans threw salt in it to avoid the Carthagineses should build it again. These horrible fate of a city was a nightmare for me and I asked my grandfather if our city could have the same fate and my grandfather tranquilized me, it happened in the old times, nothing similar could happen now. But he was wrong and he wanted spare me the grief, of course. I visited the city of Guernica in Spain some years ago and I tried to imagine the eerie atmosphere of the city when the fascist bombs fell over the city. It was these atmosphere the thing Picasso tried to paint in his painture. I searched the city of Guernica trying to evoke the day when the city's heart was ravaged. And what about the mourning today? It was a planted tree and a post telling the day and the time of the attack. Nothing more. Ana On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: From a text I wrote about my current ongoing this year project Shrouds. Do cities remember? Maps of cities are flat, yet their histories contain vertical strata of events. Where in the topography and consciousness of a city can we locate its memory? Maps of the Polish city Zielona Góra depict an empty unmarked rectangular area located on Wrocławska Street, across from the Focus Park shopping mall. Located centrally within the city this area looks abandoned, being composed mostly of broken masonry and wood debris. Inquiries to citizens of Zielona Góra indicate that many of them do not know the history of this abandoned area, including those who grew up near the site. Invited by a local museum to propose a project, I arrived to Zielona Góra (Gruenberg) knowing of the past history of the unmarked yet centrally located ruined site. On June 9th this year I flew on a small airplane to film this territory and its surroundings. The flight marked the beginning of my new project that will eventually develop into a film and a multi-layered dialogue with the citizens of Zielona Góra. During the Second World War the site was a forced labor camp, which later became a concentration camp designated primarily for Jewish women. The camp was developed on the site of the German wool factory, Deutsche Wollenwaren Manufaktur AG, which supplied the German war machine with military clothing. (It has since been converted to a shopping mall.) During the war
Re: [-empyre-] Monika Weiss -- Shrouds, 2012-2013 (as addendum to Lamentation)
Thank you Monika! I feel a deep sympathy with your writing and your work. Mourning and lament make heavy bonds :) I am back in Uruguay after 34 years of exile in Sweden and I meet now many women who has been in jail with me. We feel a deep connection, having shared those terrible years make us friends and sisters. A kind of fraternity in the grief. I don't know if Hackitectura is still working as a group, Write me off list and I can provide you with their mail adresses. Ana On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: I would love to get in touch with them, if you think possible. This has been and continues to be my main project (in other cities as well) since last year and it would be interesting to consider a collaboration with them, should they be interested. I feel a deep connection to your writing Ana by the way. Monika On Oct 5, 2012, at 8:53 AM, Ana Valdés wrote: A group of friends of mine, the architect group Hackitectura, www.hackitectura.net work with maps and try to make a cartography of the memory (or the lack of it) mapping social relations, inmaterial networks, political issues. One of their main pillars is the work with communities wanting to recover the hidden stories of the cities, the place where the real estate or the market converge with the lives of the people living there. Your remarks about the real state and the commerce and corporate world reminds me about the debate on gentrification and it's consequences. With gentrification the stories of the people are erased, shiny new white surfaces substitute the cracks of the fabric, the holes in the walls, the peeled tiles, the age, the wrinkles of the skin. Ana On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: Today is the real estate and the commerce and the corporate world--- memory of a city does not constitute a value, unless it's a negative value, because it becomes a threat to the powers. Nationalism of any kind does not interest me. Instead, is the redefinition of otherness as sameness. I grew up seeing an empty square of ground located centrally in my own city of Warsaw, which used to be a royal castle. After 1945 Soviets prevented Poland from rebuilding the castle, so that there was no national monument to speak of. But in the seventies, when the entire city was up and rebuild from zero to its simulacrum (as you know Germans reduced entire Warsaw to an ocean of rubble by systematically exploding and burning all buildings and bridges while Soviets watched this spectacle from the other side of a a very narrow river of Vistula, during Warsaw Uprising in August 1944) -- When I was growing up in seventies the rubble, gray like our grand zero in 2001, created a stark contrast to the rest of the city, a reverse monument, a whole, a living wound. On Oct 5, 2012, at 7:41 AM, Ana Valdés wrote: Beautiful text, Monika! When I was a child (I was a very precocius reader :) and read history of Rome and Greece. My favorite was the history of Carthage and I was shocked how the city was erased and the Romans threw salt in it to avoid the Carthagineses should build it again. These horrible fate of a city was a nightmare for me and I asked my grandfather if our city could have the same fate and my grandfather tranquilized me, it happened in the old times, nothing similar could happen now. But he was wrong and he wanted spare me the grief, of course. I visited the city of Guernica in Spain some years ago and I tried to imagine the eerie atmosphere of the city when the fascist bombs fell over the city. It was these atmosphere the thing Picasso tried to paint in his painture. I searched the city of Guernica trying to evoke the day when the city's heart was ravaged. And what about the mourning today? It was a planted tree and a post telling the day and the time of the attack. Nothing more. Ana On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: From a text I wrote about my current ongoing this year project Shrouds. Do cities remember? Maps of cities are flat, yet their histories contain vertical strata of events. Where in the topography and consciousness of a city can we locate its memory? Maps of the Polish city Zielona Góra depict an empty unmarked rectangular area located on Wrocławska Street, across from the Focus Park shopping mall. Located centrally within the city this area looks abandoned, being composed mostly of broken masonry and wood debris. Inquiries to citizens of Zielona Góra indicate that many of them do not know the history of this abandoned area, including those who grew up near the site. Invited by a local museum to propose a project, I arrived to Zielona Góra (Gruenberg) knowing of the past history of the unmarked yet centrally located ruined site. On June 9th this year I flew on a small airplane
[-empyre-] Monika Weiss -- Shrouds, 2012-2013 (as addendum to Lamentation)
From a text I wrote about my current ongoing this year project Shrouds. Do cities remember? Maps of cities are flat, yet their histories contain vertical strata of events. Where in the topography and consciousness of a city can we locate its memory? Maps of the Polish city Zielona Góra depict an empty unmarked rectangular area located on Wrocławska Street, across from the Focus Park shopping mall. Located centrally within the city this area looks abandoned, being composed mostly of broken masonry and wood debris. Inquiries to citizens of Zielona Góra indicate that many of them do not know the history of this abandoned area, including those who grew up near the site. Invited by a local museum to propose a project, I arrived to Zielona Góra (Gruenberg) knowing of the past history of the unmarked yet centrally located ruined site. On June 9th this year I flew on a small airplane to film this territory and its surroundings. The flight marked the beginning of my new project that will eventually develop into a film and a multi-layered dialogue with the citizens of Zielona Góra. During the Second World War the site was a forced labor camp, which later became a concentration camp designated primarily for Jewish women. The camp was developed on the site of the German wool factory, Deutsche Wollenwaren Manufaktur AG, which supplied the German war machine with military clothing. (It has since been converted to a shopping mall.) During the war about 1,000 young women worked there as seamstresses and eventually became prisoners of the concentration camp complex governed by KZ Groß-Rosen. Towards the very end of the war the prisoners were sent on one of the most tragic of the forced Death Marches where many of them died. Looking down from the airplane we see well-kept buildings surrounding the ruins of the former camp, as though it were an open yet forgotten wound in the body of the center of the city. During the performative phase of the project, I invited a group of young women from Zielona Góra to spend some time in silence on the site of the camp, wearing black scarfs which later were taken off and left behind amongst the ruins. Their presence evoked the absence of the prisoners. In the dual video projection installation at the BWA, (an exhibition that initiated the project in June), the faces of these young women look towards us in silence. In another part of the projection we observe a torso of a woman wrapping bandages onto her naked chest in a slow, fragile gesture of defense, or perhaps caress. Her body stands for our common body, anonymous as if it were a membrane between the self and the external world. Awareness of our marginality becomes elevated into the realm of meaning through our brief encounter with memory and history. “Shrouds” considers aspects of public memory and amnesia in the construction of the space of a city and its urban planning. As part of this project, citizens of Zielona Góra are invited to propose how we choose to remember, (or not) the women prisoners who perished there, and how this fulfilled the goals of a systematic destruction of an entire population. Over the course of this year citizens of Zielona Gora are also invited to respond to a questionnaire in order to propose their own ideas for the development of the area, whether as a site of commemoration, or through other forms of dialogue. Earlier this year, after over 50 years of gradual decay and abandonment, the site has been sold by the city's officials to an undisclosed developer. Yet the larger debate in Zielona Gora, a dialogue about the site of the former camp and about the city's memory and amnesia, as well as about the meaning of citizenship and response-ability shall continue, to some extend, thanks to Shrouds. http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1015094644656.448736.179396834655type=3 http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1015095089656set=a.1015094644656.448736.179396834655type=3theater http://bwazg.pl/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=1455Itemid=46___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
