material memory

Lejla Odobasic Novo

architecture and materiality

One of the inherent attributes of architecture is its materiality. It is the persistence of materiality that often stands witness to remembrance, be it individual or collective. The relationship between the way we remember, what we remember and how we materialise our remembrance is a subject explored by many scholars including Walter Benjamin in1940, Maurice Halbwachs in 1950, Pierre Nora in1984, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida in 1987, James Young 1992, Reinhart Koselleck 2002, Andreas Huyssen 2003, Aleida Assmann 2008 and Jay Winter in 2009.

It is the places of commemoration that take on the most significant role in the materialisation of memory in so far as that is their raison d’être.

Through shifting paradigms of the way we commemorate, the architectural and material expression of such places has also morphed, evolving from very static monuments (often celebrating only the victor) to that of much more subtle memorial sites that engage us by asking us to participate in the memory work. Here built form takes on a subordinate role, becoming invisible in favour of experience. Or, to use James Young’s term, the built form becomes a counter-monument. 1

1 Young, James. ‘The counter-monument: Memory against itself in Germany today’, Critical Inquiry, 18:2, 1992. pp 267–96

Rivesaltes Memorial Museum, longitudinal section

courtesy of Passelac & Roques architectes

In the field of memory studies, place as a concept is frequently deemed as a lasting and steadfast feature of culture. Thus, place also holds an important commemorative role in the attempt at preserving and honouring certain memory or memories. It also provides a communal spatial framework for what is referred to by Aleida Assmann, a leading scholar in memory studies, as a two-fold memory. 2

2 Assmann, Aleida. ‘Canon and Archive’, tr. S B Young, in A Erll & A Nünning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. p 99

Assman’s two-fold memory models indicate two complimentary ways in which she deems cultural memory operates: the inhabited functional memory (Funktionsgedächtnis) and the uninhabited storage memory (Speichergedächtnis). Storage memory is of collective nature, it is selective, normative and future-oriented. It is often the ‘official’ story (memory) of a nation propagated by official government and leading religious institutions. Functional memory is of a material nature which encapsulates and makes tangible stored memory. Memorials and sites of commemoration become places of functional memory that ensure the prorogation of storage memory, which in turn leads to solidification of the stored memory furthering collective identity building.

This solidification of memory, the selection of what and how to remember is widely debated. Jay Winter argues that the way we relate to commemoration has evolved and that ‘from roughly 1970 onwards the politics of remembrance shifted in such a way to make war a landscape of horror at the centre of which are not the heroes, the resister or even the soldiers but the innocent civilians who were massacred in its wake.’ 3

3 Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1995. p31

Reinhart Koselleck, in 1985, observed that commemorative places have evolved from memorials that reflect sacrifice and death in the name of a nation, such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, to more abstract memorials which still commemorate death, but also the enormity of loss without offering any kind of justification. Holocaust memorials are an example of such approach and he goes on to argue that the new expression of a memorial, through modern palimpsests, is one of multiple layers of meaning and inscription that allows their significance to change with the passage of time. 4

4 Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. K. Tribe. Cambridge: MIT Press,1985. p 289

Koselleck’s work anticipated that of James Young who, shortly after, used the term counter-monument in referring to several German monuments that shared a condition of invisibility, either by virtue of their initial placement or their eventual disappearance. 5 His reading of counter-monuments focused mainly on those created in the early 1990s and particularly on memorials that disappeared, changed form or remained partially hidden when installed.

5 Young, James. ‘The counter-monument: Memory against itself in Germany today’, Critical Inquiry, 18:2, 1992. pp 267–96

This notion of absence or disappearance remains a strong element in the design of memorial sites. Another element of the counter-monument which is heavily explored in the contemporary memorial design, is the involvement of the visitor –- the need for their interaction to complete the meaning of the memorial. Many contemporary memorials follow a set of design elements that align with the characteristics of countermonuments: they are stern, even austere, in their shape and material; they demand visitor interaction; they provoke memory work and they bear witness to absence while creating an unrelenting civic presence that is able to evolve over time.

Lejla Odobasic Novo

Rivesaltes Memorial museum near Perpignan in the south of France, was in many ways designed in the spirit of a countermonument. Designed by Rudy Ricciotti and Passelac & Roques architects, it opened in 2015. This former military camp bears witness to a multitude of forced displacement histories starting with its formation in 1938. It was both a military area and a transit and internment camp between 1938 and1977, experienced by between 50,000 and 80,000 people. Through harsh weather and difficult living conditions hundreds died in Rivesaltes; others, during the Second World War, were sent on to Nazi extermination camps.

The Rivesaltes Memorial site includes two parts: a new museum consisting of a monolithic structure sunk into the ground in the outline of the former central assembly area of block F, and the remnants of the eroding barracks surrounding the museum. Upon arrival, it is only the former barracks that are visible in the landscape. The remains of the old barracks are framed by the sky above and the mountains in the background. They are clearly weathered, and to a large extent eroded, by the harsh wind characteristic of this region. Some have been structurally reinforced to prevent their total disappearance but not enough to complete the narrative of the place. There are no plaques, signs or visible explanations to the history of the place. We must construct this narrative ourselves by relying on our own understanding of such sites.

Lejla Odobasic Novo

A sense of isolation engulfs the entire site. The camp is sequestrated from the town but also forms the town’s urban configuration. It follows a rigid military grid organisation with a central assembly area thus creating a set of imposed living rules defined by military logic and separated from a ‘normal life’. At other parts of the site wild scrub overpowers the landscape showing both the passage of time and furthering contemplation of the past and its relation to the present.

Closer to the barracks we can see a tilted form, above, the footprint of the former assembly area, emerging from the ground. It is the same ochre colour as the landscape that surrounds it, rendering an illusion that the ground itself is titling up. The building, 230 metres long and only 14 metres wide, silently inclines towards the sky as it is both submerged and emerges from the depths of the earth. It lies almost flat on the west side at the entrance to the site and rises slightly towards the east to meet the roof height of the surrounding barracks. This visual connection enables us to form a relationship with the camp buildings in their varying states of weather-beaten erosion.

Rather than taking the curved path to the barracks, and looking for the history of the place, one follows a straight ramp which descends into the depths of the earth and into the new museum.

The space gets darker as one proceeds deeper to an abrupt stop at the entrance. Here we feel the cut in the ground where the entire building exposes its full vastness and its nested state. The memorial is compressed between the sky and the earth, between the darkness and the light, between remembering and forgetting.

Once in the building, ties with the outside world are cut as the memorial offers no outside view except to the sky. Three patios structure the organisation of learning labs, a social area and offices, all the while providing a certain sense of comfort. A tranquil yet lonely feeling reigns in the softly lit oversized reception hall that completes the transition into the underworld of the memorial. Passing this point, we enter a small waiting area lit by one of the three courtyards. Next to the courtyard is a long narrow corridor lit with artificial light from below. Entering the corridor, one loses all sight of natural light while its length makes it impossible to predict what is on the other side. As the eyes adjust to the darkness, the relatively long walk down the corridor, brings both a sense of physical unease and a sense of disorientation which could theinterrelated experience of entering the original camp and the conditionof being displaced. Thus, the corridor demarks a passage into adifferent reality; it symbolizes the shift from the state of belonging to that of being unwanted, segregated and potentially even obliterated.

Rivesaltes Memorial Museum, plan

courtesy of Passelac & Roques architectes

The exhibition area is a large hall-like space divided into temporary and permanent conditions. Looking around the exhibition hall one finds no windows, no reference to the outside world; there is no escaping the weight of the absence in the underbelly of the building. The atmosphere here is silent. The heart of the permanent exhibition, which illustrates the chronological history of the camp, is a long table that parallels the form of the building itself. It takes us through the cyclical and repeating patterns of displacement in the camp from the Republican refugees of the Spanish Civil War, to deported Jews and Roma during WWII, detained German soldiers, the National Liberation Front and Algerian Harkis.

Looking at photographs and listening to the personal stories of the detainees is an intimate experience. One cannot help but imagine the conditions under which these people left their homes, the journey they undertook on the way to Rivesaltes, their living conditions in the camp and whether they ever found their way back home. Here, I cannot separate my personal history of displacement, bringing back memories of leaving besieged Sarajevo with my family in the early 1990s. We also lived in a camp of sorts in Libya for four years before we made our way to Canada. Thoughts then wander to the current waves of migrants living in devasting conditions in temporary camps throughout the Balkans while they are desperately trying to make their way into the EU, many of whom perish under horrific conditions while migrating towards a better future.

Completing the exhibition loop, it is with a sense of relief that one finds themselves back at the foot of the long corridor. On the way back the corridor decompresses the thoughts, allowing a contemplative transition from the sobering exhibitions to the outside world. The journey back, right, is that of ascent towards the light and the outside. It seems a quicker journey ending at the foot of the building and back at the barracks. Once again, one is faced with absence and the consequences of erosion of time. There is no sense of closure here; no poetic justice. The building and its journey offer no consolation, only a confrontation with a repeated history.

The Rivesaltes Memorial takes an impressively long and hard look at France’s containment, detention and deportation of displaced populations across the middle of the twentieth century, yet it remains universal in its echo of the vast absences of forced migration. The material past of the site is a reference point for the new building and its relationships with its history, the surrounding landscape and the collective narrative.

all images: Lejla Odobasic Novo

Rivesaltes Memorial adheres to the concept of the counter-monument. Although massive in its footprint, the building hides in plain sight, disappearing into the land, leaving us to question the cyclical patterns of history embedded in the narrative of absence.

further references:

Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. Translated by Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1950

Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003

Nora, Pierre. Les Lieux de mémoire, 7 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984

Lejla Odobasic Novo is a licensed architect by the OAA and she currently teaches at the International Burch University Department of Architecture in Sarajevo. Her research lies within the area of culture and architecture in contested spaces.