[-empyre-] Monika Weiss -- Shrouds, 2012-2013 (as addendum to Lamentation)

[Monika Weiss]

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.10150988884644656.448736.179396834655&type=3

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150988885089656&set=a.10150988884644656.448736.179396834655&type=3&theater

http://bwazg.pl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1455&Itemid=46
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