What can be remembered of a street that has been erased from the cityscape? And how? The media art and performance collective LIGNA 2023 explored this question in their audio installation in the former Judengasse. A placeless voice sounded from numerous analogue radios through the inhospitable and neglected street ‘An der Staufenmauer’, which today shapes parts of the former Judengasse. Like a fleeting architecture, fragmentary memories were located along the street. This work forms the basis for a further chapter in the dialogue. In collaboration with the architect Marc Grellert, LIGNA is now working on the VR panoramas designed by Grellert, which depict the Judengasse in 1861. The digital tools allow historical architecture to be experienced immersively and offer new ways of remembering. In LIGNA's artistic approach, this supposed reality is haunted by voices and text fragments. The walk through the reconstruction of the Judengasse is accompanied by Siegfried Kracauer's text Erinnerung an eine Pariser Straße, written in 1930, when the Judengasse had already been largely demolished. And the echo of other voices, such as those previously recorded by his uncle Isidor Kracauer in Geschichte der Judengasse (1906), also reverberates between the virtual houses.
LIGNA: Road without memory
VR installation in the Golden Apple
Does not a breath of air that touched the past also touch us? Is there not an echo of those who are silent in the voices to which we lend our ear? If so, then there exists a secret agreement between the past generations and our own.
Walter Benjamin: Der Begriff der Geschichte (1940)
Text, direction, production: LIGNA
Voice: Stephan Wolf-Schönburg
Audio design: Rupert Jaud
VR panoramas: Mark Grellert
Duration 6 minutes
The work can be seen at the Goldener Apfel on Thursdays from 2 to 6 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays from 10am to 5pm. Admission is free.
