REcall
Landscaping a cultural affected, subjective perception
edited by Thurid Andreßen, Christine Guérard, Julia Hutzler, Stephan Fiebig
Landscaping REcall
REcall is a research project founded by EC Culture 2007-13 Programme (n. 2012 - 0927 / 001 - 001 CU7 COOP7) focused on the possible roles Museography can play when dealing with Difficult Heritage such as the ones coming from conflicts and wars. REcall wishes to envision new ways to the handling of Painful Places & Stories going behind any traditional approach: there is the need to shift from the ‘simply’ commemoration attitude to a more active involvement and participation of people in/with Places & Stories, through design strategies of ‘reappropriation’ (www.recall-project.polimi.it).
The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the authors and the European Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
REcall Consortium POLIMI-Politecnico di Milano - Coordinator - (Italy) AAU-Aalborg University (Denmark) NTUN-Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway) UNEW-Newcastle University (United Kingdom) Fasltad Museum, Falstad (Norway) Museo della Resistenza, Turin (Italy) Associated Partners Ergan Foundation Romsdal museet Routes Agency Snark © The Authors: Creative Commons: license CC BY SA 3.0
Landscaping
edited by Thurid Andreßen, Christine Guérard, Julia Hutzler, Stephan Fiebig
REcall
Table of contents Our subjective perception of Falstad 11
On the way to Falstadsenteret
13
Searching in the invisible
29
The different enclosures
30
The meaning of freedom
Accounts of survivers Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, Joseph Onfray, LĂŠon Delabre, Boris Taslitzky 34
To behave the freedom
Psychological theories Bruno Bettelheim and Viktor Emil Frankl 36
To behave the freedom
Our issue/ approach 38
Terrorscapes
Philosophical backgrounds the excistencialists, JP Satre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty etc. 41
To choose to be free
43
To feel the world around
Landscaping 45
Our wishes
46
Three phases project
48
Mapping
51 Landscaping 52
choreographic objects
55
The art works - Open Call
57
choreografic object 1
Landscaping
Landscaping book — 11
On the way to Falstad After flying over Norway until Trondheim, we chose to get to Falstadsentret hitchhiking. It was a good way for a first contact with our subject. We spoke with our three drivers about Falstad and what they knew about the story of the region. We realised that there are a lot of myths around Falstad, more storytelling than well-founded informations. When we finally arrived at the center we got an idea of the stories behind... ‘I now that...’ ‘I heard...’ ‘My grandfather told me that...’ ‘It’s somewhere there, but exactly we don’t know...’ (submarine) ‘One man in the region was very bad.....’
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Searching in the invisible As we arrived on the site, we were surprised by the infinity beauty of the area, and the quite purety of the site. Everything was so beautiful, the landscape and the village, outside and inside the building, everything white, with freshly picked flowers on the tables. Before the workshop, we did’nt wanted to research anything about Falstad. We wanted to come there with an open mind, innocent... wanted to get surprised. That’s why we reached the camp without a pre-minded opinion. So on the first look it seems to have been a cloister. But what about the “difficult heritage”?!”. We got to know then the story of the camp. We hardly searched for some visual traces of the difficult past and slowly we reconstructed the story in our mind, with the help from the devoted members of the center.
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... Searching in the invisible We were trying to understand the place, but we couldn’t see it like it was. Of course, we could imagine with the fotos or the old plans but not really feel it. We started searching the traces of the history in the immaterial heritage. How did they used to live there? What did they do ? What did they saw? What did they felt? We had our comfortable sleeping rooms in this former horrible place, walked the same corridors, had the same views out of the house.. Because we couldn’t see anything, we began, unconsciously, to use our others senses, to feel the landscape around us: to touch the bark, to hear the soil under our feet and the wind in the trees, to smell the moos, to hear the rain on the windows and the roof... We were searching traces in the invisible, in the “felt”. We arrived at this idea/supposition: Maybe this way of trying to find traces with our own body is a much more direct way of dealing with the difficult heritage. The past started to take space in the present, we had to make decisions and we needed a position. These_ The usual memorial leaves us outside. It doesn´t need anything and stays very abstract. So our behaviour will always be very passive. We think that to get involved in a historical context it needs all of our senses. It can make a remembering act to something situative and individual.
smell of burning fire sound of people linving there sound of animals
smell of wool warm texture sound of the carpet
scratch and sound of the bush taste of wild fruits
stroke of leaves smell of plants and flowers
smell of resin sound of creaking tree barks clawing branches
sound of the flowing water sound of the wind trought the ferns
smell of stagnant water pool of water’s sound under the feet sticking muddy textures
thundery air sound of the wind through the grass lashing grasses on the legs smell of fresh cut grasses
sea smell of the fjord sound of the wave against the stones sound of the water carrying the shingles sinking feet on the beach
the cell
the main building
the enclosed camp area
the near surrouding
the region
Landscaping book — 29
The different enclosures To prisoners were seperated in categories, which implicated different enclosures and thus unequal possibilities of contact with the outside: Categories of prisoners - norwegian Jews - “The Dangerous�, most of them tried to escape in other camps, most of them were former Yugoslaws - sowjet prisoners of war - female prisoners mostly because of their political attitude or as hostages - prisoners of war - political prisoners - hostages, mostly Norwegians - they were imprisoned for family members who could escape work - on farms - in quarries - military area_working for airport facilities - building houses or streets - in the forrest as lumberjacks - housework - digging graves boundaries - cell - barracks - main building - camp boundaries - guarded workers send out invisible boundaries - views inside/outside - illegal post transfer - illegal camp administration - wood workshop
the meaning of freedom Because “the camp area”, like it was defined during the workshop, wasn’t giving enough answers to our questions, we enlarged our look to the outside and began to search traces all around the landscape. We found out that the camp area is not only restricted to the near surrounding of the main building. We learned quickly, that the main building and the ‘camp area’ were bounded with a lot of others sites. It was for us very important to understand the camp not only like an enclosed area, but like a constellation of sites. The prisoners were seperated in categories depending on their cultural or political backgrounds. The everyday live of the prisoners could have been very different from each other. That influenced directly their threat/possibility of freedom. Some of them could walk quite freely through the village, had contact with inhabitants and worked in their professions. We studied what the camp spatially meant for each group of the prisoners.
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Norwegian Jews were treated very bad. They weren´t allowed to have any contact with others. They used to live in the cells by themself without daylight. For working they were sent to the quarry and were forced to carry stones to one place and back again. Prisoners of war, sowjets, former yugoslavs had to stay in the barracks or sometimes in the area of the camp. They were seen as dangerous. They had to dig the graves in the forest. Women, mostly because of their political attitude, were imprisoned in the main building. They had to do the house work and it was forbidden for them to have any contact to male prisoners. Hostages and male political prisoners had much more possibilities of physical freedom. Because of their physical mobility they could build up an illegal camp administration and bring news from the outside. Guards with racist background. Some had a friendly behavior to a few of the prisoners. Some of them were just very brutal and mean. People from the village helped smuggling letters and other things. Some cared for the families of the prisoners which went to Falstad and couldn´t reach their relative. Sometimes they risk their own lives. Our question is now: What does this all mean for the individual decision of freedom? Where does freedom begin? What is the human aspect in all of this and what makes us all the same?
roof drawing the frame, for an ephemeral picture
view of the neigbourhood
view of the ‘Kommandant Haus’
view of the fjord
view of the bridge
view of the bridge
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To behave the freedom We found a few accounts from survivors of the camps, explaining, how they could mentally and physically survive the surrounding atrocity. To remember, to recall and rebuild Charlotte Delbo (1913 Vigneux-sur-Seine - 1985 Paris) is a french woman of letters and a resistant. During the second world war she was deported to Auschwitz in the only convoy of french political deportee. They were obsessed that at least one had to come back from the camp to bear witness. That she survived especially thanks to the poems and the theater textes, she was trying to recall: a very long and hard memory effort. She put 57 poems together again and put on a play, the ‘Malade Imaginaire’. As way to survive, she also mentioned the memories of her life before the camp and the dialogue with the others prisoners. In spite of the horrible aspect of the concentration camp, from which “no animal could came back”, she “learned there something priceless”: the courage, the goodness, the generosity, the solidarity and “a very large faith in her fellow”. To cling to a daily ‘tradition’, to stay human To resist individually to preserve his dignity and integrity, to resist again the self-effacement, to preserve his status of a civilised human being. “Here, to have a wash everyday in the trouble water of a squalid washbasin is a quite useless operation, hygienic and healthy seeing, but extremly important as a symptom of a rest of vitality, and necessary as an instrument of moral survival. (...) We are slaves, exposed to all the humiliations, doomed to a quite sure death, but we have still one resource and we have to defend it with fierceness because it is the last one : to refuse our consent. That’s why it is a duty to ourselves to wash our faces without soap, in dirty water, and to wipe one’s face with our jacket. A duty, to polish our shoes, not because it’s written in the regulations, but because of the dignity and the propriety. A duty at last to stand up straight and not to drag one’s clogs, not to tribute to the Prussian discipline, but to stay alive, and not to beginn to die.” by Primo Levi ”If this is a man”
Charlotte Delbo, photographed by Eric Schwab, date unknown
Primo Levi, First edition jacket of “If this is a man”
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To pray, to maintain the soul All activities, which are appealing to the soul, are human practises. They were forbidden in the camps. “we can die from famine, ‘they’ can take ‘the fat and also the skin’ ; but they can’t erase the thought. ... And what we’re calling the ‘moral’, it’s the thought which’s entertains it and, after all, the religious thought.” from Joseph Onfray, L’Âme résiste
To draw, to see through a frame, to find a kind of beauty, to give back a kind of humanity and to testify Léon Delabre: 50 drawings Boris Taslitzky: 106 drawings and aquarels Zoran Music: (Dachau) He was drawing the piled up corpses, not only because he found in it a certain tragical beauty, but also for respect, like a tribute. He didn´t want to forget them. To draw these bodies gives them a face, a humanity, a personnality, a dignity and a grace. Drawing is a way to resist, to stay human, to give humanity and to denounce the barbarity. The artistic creation, underground, illegal, allows not to forget oneself behind a simple number, a simple object. “Thanks to the drawing, I took consciousness that even in these horrible conditions, these conditions of the extreme, I was always a man, a human being. A man, who has always his dignity, his mind, his culture. This art allows me to fight, to fight against the Germans, to fight against the death, always there, day and night. And even if life is a roaming, I prefer to wander in the drawing art as among piles of corpses. To draw bodies was for me the only activity, which had a sense. This practise was a way to find a little humanity again. After all, a beast couldn’t do that. (...) The art was for us a spiritual escape, essential to survive.”
Boris Taslitzky
Joseph Onfray
Leon Delabre
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Zoran Music
Invisibility, the denial of reality To see without seeing was the first level of this radical ‘strategy’. Like a shield, the next was the apathy, the insensibility, indifference to everything including his own pain and suffering: not to feel, not to see. The eyes had to avoid, the glance had to rebound everytime on everything. The informations, seen or heard, couldn’t (wouldn’t) go to the consciousness. This kind of “invisibility” is often representated in the figure of the ‘zombie’ (called ‘musulman’ in the camps language). Split of personality phenomenon Bruno Bettelheim (1903 Vienna - 1990 Maryland, american child psychologis) analysed this after the liberation, when he collected accounts of the survivors. They spoke about them, but using the third person. It seemed to be a story telling of some other survivors, but in fact, they were speaking about themselves. The own experience became the experience of somebody else. After the denial of the reality and the transformation in an ‘invisible person’, the self-consciousness can refuse instinctively the total decline. And the logical way to preserve itself is to go out of oneself, to became an onlooker.
Victor Frankl
To ask for the sense, from the experience in the camp to a new way of thinking the psychiatry One man catches particulary our attention about the way to think about ‘resistance’ in a boundless inhuman situation. His name is Viktor Emil Frankl (Vienna 1905 - Vienna 1997). His personal experiences in the concentration camps (Theresienstadt and Auschwitz) influenced his work as professor of neurology and psychiatry. He considered as the father of a new way to think the human psychology: “logotherapy “ (logo: from gr. logos “sense” & therapeia “care, cure”). This one is considered as the third school of psychotherapie based on the need of sense (meaning), while the psychanalisis of Freud is centered on the principle of pleasure and this of Alfred Adler on the wish of individual power. In the camp, he observed that the most robust prisoners, who were the most in action, were the first to die, whereas those who seemed to be weaker resisted much longer : “Face to the absurdity, the “weakest” de-
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velopes an inside life, which lets us a place to retain hope and to ask the individual sense”. When Frankl writes about the ‘sense’, he means the sense of life. He considers the man as a totality of three dimensions: physical, psychic and spiritual, and endowed with a primary motivation, which turns it on the way to his own life. As a human being, a man can choose freely his perspective, his position and his attitude facing the conditions, interior or exterior of his existence. The logotherapy is a psychotherapy destinated to make the individual responsibly and mature on the sense of his life.
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Terrorscapes While researching we realised that the common question in our work is the question of the definition of freedom. But whom does this include? During the workshop in Falstad we got to know much more stories about its history and the people being involved. We heard that lots of people started to help the prisoners in various ways. And we heard that after the WW II the Norwegians imprisoned the Nazis and collaborators and did the same to them, just the other way around. So we started mapping the ways and marked the different places on the map. We defined the places where all of them experienced the same, places of torture, places of meetings. There were lots of stories about decicion making. The guards for example made their decision for freedom very different from the prisoners or the people which used to live in Ekne. So, we asked us the same question of freedom for everyone. That means for the guards, the prisoners, the helpers, the inhabitants, the Nazi commandants. The only satisfying answer we got was from the existencialists. A movement out of the time..
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“And the choices that each one made of their life and themselves was authentic since it was done in the presence of death.” Sartre on the Mémorial de la déportation, Paris
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To choose to be free Emil Frankl’s position joins the work of the existentialists. By the way, in German the logotherapy is also called the ‘existence therapy’. The existentialism is a philosophical movement of the XIX and XX centuries, which puts the indivual existence, the subjectivity, the liberty/ freedom, and the personal choices back in the heart of the reflection. All the existentialists attached an essential importance to the personal and passionated engagement in the search for the good and the truth. That’s why the personal experience based on own convictions is essential in this question for truth. The interpretation of a situation, in which an individuum is bounded, will be always better, as the interpretation of an observant, undone and “objective”. The man is not determined in advance in his own essence, but he is free and responsible for his own existence. The individuum isn’t programmed, like the animals or the plants, but “the existence precedes the essence” (JP Sartre). In this way, the choice (the deny of choice is also a choice) is central in the human existence. The liberty to choose implies commitments and responsability. Because the choice is free, the man has to accept the risk and the responsability of his commitment. The most of the philosophers since Platon uphold that the moral goodness is the same for everybody. In the XIX century, the Danish philosph Kierkegaard affirms that the man can only find the sense of his life through the discover of his own vocation. “I have to find a truth, one for myself... one for I could live or die.”. Then, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, that only the individuum could choose the moral value of his acts and the acts of the others. “(...) can a man, locked up in a tower, still be free again, plan his escape, also if he has ended in failure, because the failure doesn’t limit the freedom, rather the failure is a piece of the human existence and a piece of his freedom. The particularity in the human freedom consists in the choice, left to the man, to think deep about the circumstances or to go over them, as far as the human possibilities. Because in the final consequence, nobody, also the prisoner in the tower, will have to put up with the final circumstances, the man will stay free. Freedom means to be ready to suffer with the future circumstances. With them the man isn’t ready to put up.” Free interpretation of Being and nothingness, JP Sartre (Paris 1905 - 1980)
Kierkegaard
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Jean-Paul Sartre
“I was a short time ago in the public garden. The chestnut tree’s root was sinking tin the soil, just under my bench. I didn’t remember it was a root. The words just vanished and, with them, the signification of the things, theirs directions for use, the weak repears traced by the man on their surface. I was sit down, a little stooped, the head low, alone in front of this dark and knotty mass, completely rough and which was making me afraid. And then I had this illumination. It tooks my breath away. Never, before these last days, I felt what ‘to exist’ was meaning. I was like the others, like those who have a walk along the see in their spring clothings. I said like them “the see is green; this white point, on high, it is a gull”, but I didn’t felt that it was existing, that the gull was an ‘existing-gull’; usually the existence hides itself. It is here, around us, in us, it is us, we can’t say two words without to speak about it and, finally, we don’t touch it. When I believe I was thinking about it, we must believe I was thinking about nothing, I had a blank mind, or only just one word in my mind, the word ‘to be’. (...) To exist, it is to be here, simply ; the existing beings appear, let them meet, but we can’t never destroy them. (...) The existence is not something, to think about it from a distance: it has to invade you suddenly, to stop on you, to weight heavy on your heart like a big still beast - or then there is nothing anymore. (...) Suddenly they were existing and then, suddenly, they didn’t exist anymore : the existence has no memory; of the missings, it’s taking nothing - not even a remembrance. The existence everywhere, to the infiny, too much, always and everywhere; the existence - which is actually only borderd of existence (...) They didn’t want to exist, but they could avoid it ; that’s it. (...) Every existing people’s born without reason, extends itself by weakness and dies of meeting.” Extract of ‘6 hours on the afternoon’, in Nausea, JP Sartre
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Maurice-Merleauu Ponty
To feel the world around To exist thanks to a sensory behaviour with the world around- the Phenomelogie of perception: One existentialist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, studied particulary the part of the sensory, the perception in the existence : the phenomelogy of the perception, and tried to understand the act of feeling. He described this invisible link between the human body and the other (the world and itself, because they are made from the same material), this kind of double meeting of the body and the world. An individuum becomes aware of himself and of the meaning of ‘existence’, thanks to his sensory relation to his environment. “A human body is here, when between seeing and seeable, beween touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between the hand and the hand it is making a kind of recrossing, when the spark of the feeling sensory* is lighting up, when this fire is taking, which doesn´t stop to burn, until those accident of the body undoes what no accident doesn’t be enough to do...” (“le monde sensible” according to MerleauPonty is the world, as perceived by the senses) Intersensory nature of the space experience: any movement in the space needs the senses of the one who’s doing the movement. More as just the sense of the view, it is the combination of all of them, which gives the possibility to the man to perceive, to move and to be in action in the space.
The sense of vision gets repressed during very emotional situations. RenĂŠ Magritte, 1928
In the experience of the reality the visual and the tactile sense are strongly connected. Herbert Bayer , 1932
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Our Wishes Our Wishes: to speak directly to the senses (less to see - stronger to feel) We exposed at the beginning of this booklet, our first impressions about the site. We came there without knowledge and we were already pushed to search the traces with our senses. What could we imagine about the visitors, who are coming to Falstadsenteret with the knowledge, and maybe the wish to see marks and scars? Is the feeling of ‘search in the invisible’ stronger? Could we, with our proposition, intensify this feeling and these moments of search? We don’t think, that Falstad needs to reconstruct the camp like it used to be. There are other ways, smoother and more sensitive to describe the story of the camp. Falstadsenteret plays already with the imagination of its visitors: some informations are spread, just enough to imagine by itself, how it could have been in the past... The exhibition was not only interesting but really aesthetic. There are no pastiche, like for example the reconstruction of some buildings or destroyed elements attending to the camp. And this position is the strongness of Falstadsenteret. The seriousness of the subject and the sensibility used to transmit the history is interesting because it appeals to our own emotional and cultural background, and the feelings or sensations, which are emerging, stay for long in the body and the soul. We agree with this kind of recall and transmission and want to suscribe our project in this intellectual and aesthetic choice. One experience during the workshop was very strong for us. It was the walk around the whole area. Our bodies were in movement, our minds and senses open to receive a lot of informations. Naturally the spoken informations were essential to understand the story of Falstad, but a second type of information came in our minds. Some kind of memories of sensations, what we heard, we smelled, we saw, we touched. These made some kind of hard print in our minds. During the walk, we could stay alone and do something like a “meditative” walking, thinking about everything we heard and felt. We also could exchange with the others. It is one of the most impressive moments: the exchange about feelings and experiences. We learned a lot, not only about the story of Falstad but also the impressions and knowledge of our workshop s’ companions. What we took with us from Falstad are not only some visual pictures, but even more what we felt.
THREE PHASES PROJECT We develop our project in three parts, corresponding to three times: - a mapping of the “cultural� landscape of Falstadsenteret - an installation in Falstadsenteret - a participative, international, collective artwork to activate the mapping
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MAPPING “A good perception of the reality requires to opening one’s heart to emotions and as the same time one’s eyes to the light.” Pierre Sansot in “Daydreaming in the City” Falstad, a palimpsest reveals thanks to its cultural landscape A map is an introduction to the ground’s knowledge, representing a territory through coding. With its own legible complexity, it arouses the wish of immersion in the object and then in the landscape, which is representated. There are two goals, we would like to reach with our maps: to create the desire of immersion in this space, to pass on and to let the people appropriate it throught their own experiences. Karl Gottlob Schelle is a german philosoph and wrote a little essay about ‘The art to have a walk’ (Spaziergänge oder die Kunst spazieren zu gehen, 1802). Some aspects of his work are interesting for our project. “The walk is not only a simple movement of the body, which should exclude any activities of the mind. There is no charm to imagine a walker like a simple machine in motion, of which the mind is putting at rest, while the body moves. (...) During the walk, the attention of the mind doesn’t have to be pushed (...). It has to slide above the things, some kind of, to answer to their appeal, whereas to constrain the mind to study them. Receptive and open, the mind has to welcome with calm the impressions of the surrounding things, whereas to warm up with passion on some objects, he has to give himself without any resistance (...)” Our map should be used by the visitors as a tool to have a walk in the cultural landscape around Falstasenteret. We understand the center like a palimpsest of stories and functions, through the time and the history. That’s why we don’t want to focuse only on one point of view, but we would like to weave links between the stories and the contemporary uses, both on the whole area surrounding Falstadsenteret. It will invite the visitors of Falstadsenteret, of the region or the local people, to walk in a particulary rich landscape. Through the walk, they will wake up their senses and use their own background and brought knowledge to decode the geographical and cultural landscapes. Work with the body to reach the mind To walk to meet the territory, it is structuring the comprehension of the territory, because each step is a way to be, to live and to build the space.
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More of 200 prisoners were exectuted there. The way between the camp and the Falstad forest wasn‘t desperately rarely the last one.
taste of fresh clear water running water
Prisoners were transported regulary through the fjord. At the end of the WWII, several corpes from the forest were sunk there.
Some prisonners did have a direct contact with the inhabitants, working in their farms, fields and forests. They received help there. farm s‘ smells sounds of workers
salty haze
pucked fruits‘ flavour warmth and growls from animals metallic sounds of the tools colour and smell of the vegetable garden
seasickness waves lapping water sounds of boats
smoke from burning garbage
wind through the ferns clawing branches cracking boles forest‘s crown stroking sound of falling leaves touch of the treebark
taste of the wild fruits
sea smell of the fjord sound of the water between the stones waves meeting the cliff
ringing from animals‘ bell hum of a tractor spreadings‘ odour
needle on the floor
smell of fresh cut grasses caress of the corncob on the legs water leaking throught the shingels wind throught the grasses steps sinking in the sand muffled sounds pool of water‘s sound under the feet feet‘s tracks sticking muddy textures smoke of burning leaves odour of stagnant water cries of playing children
sap‘s smell
rain on the surface still water
smells from the kitchen warbling birds appearance of the sky sunbeam on the face
smell of woodfire in the fireplace cracks from the old wood house
smells from mosses flowing water
Most of the prisoners arrived at the train station. On the way they took to join the camp, they saw the whole landscape surrounding and probably also inhabitants.
sounds from the railway
traffic‘s humming noise feets‘ slamming on the asphalt warmth‘s radiation from the bitume
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“Never trust a thought that did not occur while walking.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Landscaping Landscape: a cultural affected, subjective perception of a region in its aesthetic entireness The description of the ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1335 by Petrarch regarded as an expression of a new nature and landscape experience in which combine aesthetic and contemplative perspectives together. “The highest mountain in this region I climbed on this day, only driven by the desire to see these unusual height region with my own eyes.” Petrarch also describes in a letter the hurdles of the ascension and the search for the very individual sense of the operation. He describes the emotional and mental changes that happen during the trip with him. The conceptual approach that feeds us is the conscious examination of a location and thus the positioning of the self in this space-time continuum with all our senses as another form of perception. The theme of freedom as the basis for our interventions leads the confrontation of all stakeholders with the landscape and the different layers of history without accusing or judging. It’s about involving the ubiquitous landscape. Thereby the camp and its history is getting extended to the places of arrival, working, meeting, of dying. “My perception is not just the sum of visual, tactile and audible conditions: I’ll take on all-encompassing way true with my entire being. I grasp the unique structure of a thing, its unique essence that appeals to all my senses at once.” Merleau-Ponty
Landscaping and the Open Call Standing in the context of the freedom issue, important locations are defined in our map as a decentralized net with the camp. The places are all relevant and a part of common history. An Open Call within Norway, but also in the countries being involved in the story to allow the widest possible participation. The history of the camp goes beyond Norway’s borders. This can not be displayed in our map, but our landscaping can respect that. It will be created spaces of meaning without concrete function. The landscape inbetween is the neutral space, it is not predetermined, and the viewer fills it with himself.
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choreographic objects “Physical forms can be characterized only by the fact that we have a body itself. We would merely visually apprehending beings, we would have an aesthetic assessment of the physical world always remain failed. As humans, but with a body that teaches us what gravity is, contraction, force, etc., we gather to us the experiences that enable us to empathize only make the foreign states .. in our own experience is the only explanation. “ Heinrich Wölfflin, 1886 We take the open call as a tool to integrate participation in our work. It’s important to us that dealing with the place and the subject is not dogmatic from one point of view, but can be discussed with all. Like this there is a good chance to achieve acceptance and processing in incur. In the competition and in the participatory planning phase before, the following topics expression-gesture built atmospheres Correspondence between body and architecture will be discussed and recognizable shown on the choreographic object. The themes are borrowed from the book “The thinking of the body and the architectural space” by Wolfgang Meisenheimer. This book is part of the open call.
1_Atelier Oslo, 2_ Tilapia Nishikawa, 3_Richard Serra, 4_Corridor Naumann
1
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4
3
2
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Materialien A “place” born from a reaction between: space and time, material and memory, past and unexpected. That’s why these are imperceptible, unlocalizable without a man, who activates them. The choreographic objects related to the history of the place and the subject of freedom. They should not be a purely visual architectures. For this reason, we limit the materiality of - local wood - semi-transparent to reflective surfaces
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THE ART WORKS_OPEN CALL “expression-gesture In body shape and movement of organism´s, the self-manifestation is a vital and meaningful gesture. People can generate and disseminate new over their natural un inherited forms of expression beyond. The gestures are means of self-expression as well as the language and the works of art. They function as sign systems, which provide information about our own, but they can also secondly sent to other beings and thirdly do with facts, may be shown within the gestures. built atmospheres In architectural space are sensual sensations such as hot / cold, light / dark, hard / soft, etc.. They are not perceived as isolated stimuli, but embedded in a context of experience of the material world and ourself. The movements of my body have an impact on the succession of their appearance on the “patch-work” of sensory phenomena that arises in me. The director of perception gradients leads my ´body-I`, which brings memories and desires, so that even the perception of experiences clearly the “my” are. Using my body as a tool while viewing, walking, turning helps me to understand the space, the gestures of the architecture are readable for me. Correspondence between body and architecture There is a potential for expression, which have the body and the space of architecture in common and that is activated at every encounter with built things. No architectural experience is not affected by this term archive. To me it seems usefull to speak of gestural ur-phenomena, and it is possible to limit their typology of four: - the gesture of erection (the vertical build) - the gesture here! and there! (Put sites) - the separation of inside and outside (draw boundaries) - and gestures for narrow and wideness (tension produce)” “The thinking of the body and the architectural space” by Wolfgang Meisenheimer The pathway should play with the visitors, tickles his interest and open gradualy his perception. He has to rythm his own walk, on the rythm offered by the space around him. The different qualities of the installations offer to the visitor pratical ressources for his actions and engage at the same time his capacities of expression. From this dialogue with each installation is born a communication between the visitor and the area. He participates to the construction of the place, because he is the physical point of interaction between what he is taking from the outside to enrich his inside, which is giving back outside, through is behaviour. From this exchange, at the same time intimate and generous, as much physical as sensorial, ensures dialogues with the other people and the history.
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choreografic object 1 The first choreografic object is located on the Camp Site. It defines the entry of the center. Its first well seen gesture is the welcome gesture, nearly as a signal. While coming closer the visitor has to decide between a comfortable walk through and close to the object or the object itself. The inside of the object is made out of wood, the outside is shiny black paint. The walls of the objects are nearly closing towards the courtyard. But at the very end you can see the tree in the shiny black of the painted wood. The black shiny painted wood reflects the surrounding landscape and connectes inside with the outside. This tree survives to all stories of Falstad and is nearly the only visible trace left. But for us a tree is also a symbol of life and freedom.
Attendees
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Workshop team AHA - Thurid Andreßen & Julia Hutzler und Stephan Fiebig
Christine Guérard
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Thanks to Falstadsenteret, Arne & Tone The RECALL workshop organizers
REcall docs – Norway workshop book Published by Politecnico di Milano, DAStU © The Authors: Creative Commons: license CC BY SA 3.0
rome workshop book REcall is a research project founded by EC Culture 2007-13 Programme focused on the possible roles Museography can play when dealing with Difficult Heritage such as the ones coming from conflicts and wars. REcall wishes to envision new ways to the handling of Painful Places & Stories going behind any traditional approach: there is the need to shift from the ‘simply’ commemoration attitude to a more active involvement and participation of people in/with Places & Stories, through design strategies of ‘reappropriation’ (www.recall-project.polimi.it). editors Viviana Gravano lives and works in Rome, where she was born in 1961. She is Curator of Contemporary Art and Professor of Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan and at the IED (European Institute of Design) in Rome. She is the Coordinator of the Master of Museum Curator and Events IED Rome. She collaborates and is part of the Editorial Board of the journal “Art’O_ Cultura policy and the performing arts”. Giulia Grechi holds a PhD in “Theory and social research” at the University La Sapienza (Rome, Italy). Her Phd thesis, “The embodied representation. An ethnography of the body between colonial stereotypes and contemporary art”, examined the works of the Afro-American artists Lorna Simpson and Kara Walker, focusing on colonial representation, the concept of embodiment and emotions as field of knowledge’s production. She is currently research fellow at “L’Orientale” (Naples) as a member of the EU Project “Mela – European Museums in the Age of Migrations”.
REcall is a research project funded by EC Cluture 2007-13 Programme (n. 2012 - 0927 / 001 - 001 CU7 COOP7)
REcall