thessaloniki: a past in traces

wall of tears, abu dis

Concrete routes: the almost 10-meter high Separation Wall/"Barrier" in Greater Jerusalem cuts through a Palestinian neighborhood, an incision that splits the community into East Jerusalem and the West Bank. A "wall of tears", a transport of consequences from the Warsaw of World War II to Abu Dis, the freight of past and present occupations. Suffering communities, and those in between; Berlin's wall is recalled in testaments of resistance.

arts of memory and truth

yad vashem, jerusalem: high above the city, a visible reminder of origins. Imposing, spectacular, watching. martyrs and victims of history claim memory spots, expressed in the unusually lush landscape. Sculptures of transiting victims, stones for destroyed communities, freight cars that symbolise the departure from the Holocaust and arrival in Israel. Continuous and discontinuous journeys. Fraught relocations from and into a violent history of displacement. Resting grounds for the dead - eternal belonging.

to, and from, Auschwitz

Scale, smell, and order: Auschwitz stretches reason, and defies it, too. It is a grid of barracks, crematoria ruins, and shooting sites. And green fields. Fields of nothingness and excess. To the victims: I am exhausted from thinking about what happened to you here and there. In "My Place/Meine Ortschaft", Peter Weiss wrote about the trains, the arteries of death, and their destination: "At the station of Auschwitz the goods trains clank. Locomotive whistles and lumbering smoke. Buffers that rattle up against each other. The air full of misty rain, the paths softened, the trees bare and damp. Soot-blackened factories, surrounded by barbed wire and walls. Wooden carts grind by drawn by thin horses, the peasant shrouded in silence, the colour of earth. Old women on the paths, wrapped in shawls, carrying bundles. Further off in the fields single farmsteads, bushes and poplars. Everything dismal and worn to bits. Forever the trains up above on the rail embankment, slowly rolling backwards and forwards, barred airholes in the wagons. Sidings lead further, to the barracks, and still further, over barren fields to the end of the world".

memory points

Krakow to Sachsenhausen: from Galician ghetto to model concentration camp in Oranienburg, memorial spaces to the victims are partially archived in their original state. Chairs in the wartime deportation point of Podgorze symbolise the absence of bodies, while "former" is the generic keyword to describe the erasure of Jews from Krakow following their deportation to Belzec and Auschwitz. Crowds and congregation.

Contrary to this intimacy is Sachsenhausen, a model camp in a sprawling suburban memorial site. Neighbours and knowledge. It is disturbingly clinical and experiential in its presentation of the past. The preservation of execution trenches and pathology rooms invites entry into the after life of Nazi persecution.