Contested Spaces Concerted Projects

CONTENTS

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Foreword Conflictual, Contested and Contentious A Taxonomy of Difficult Spaces Cristina F. Colombo and Jacopo Leveratto

I. THEMES 28

Towards New Memorial Practices Michela Bassanelli

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Reweaving Landscapes of Memories Cristina F. Colombo

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The Re-Appropriation of Public Spaces Jacopo Leveratto

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The Adaptive Reuse of Neglected Buildings Francesca Lanz

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Museums and Collections as Contentious Sites Elena Montanari

II. PROJECTS & APPROACHES 110

Exhibiting Fragile Memories A Discussion with Leonardo Sangiorgi from Studio Azzurro Marcella Camponogara

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Hybrid Space Lab: Re-Charting Places Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Frans Vogelaar

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The ’89 Box An Interview with Alex Axinte and Cristi Borcan from studioBASAR Madalina Ghibusi with Jacopo Leveratto

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Chisinau Jungle and the New Belgrade Blocks Modernist Suburbs as World Communal Heritage Rena Rädle and Vladan Jeremić

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Challenging Hegemonic “Truths” A Conversation with Eyal Weizman and Sarah Nankivell from Forensic Architecture Cristina F. Colombo

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Anna — Monumento all’Attenzione An Interview with Gianni Moretti Michela Bassanelli

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Author Profiles

Conflictual, Contested and Contentious A Taxonomy of Difficult Spaces Cristina F. Colombo and Jacopo Leveratto

Europe has existed as a cultural, political, and economic identity for centuries. However, the nature and consistency of this identity have been so contested over time, to bring continental institutions to study adequate countermeasures. Since the mid-twentieth century, for example, one of the major challenges in this sense has been the necessity of linking European identity to forms of integration that could promote coexistence and mutual interaction among people. The problem, however, is that the construction of an open and inclusive European identity cannot be based simply on neofunctionalist approaches. On the contrary, it needs a social constructivist perspective that highlights the multiple ways reality is continuously created by social actors and public discourses, in processes that cannot be reduced to either agency or structures (Delanty and Rumford 2005, 2).

For this reason, today, an essential role in this regard is played by the possibility of building an open and inclusive European cultural heritage that supports these processes. In that, by being identified as a reflection of people’s constantly evolving values, beliefs, knowledge, and traditions, it can represent the ideal base for the process of self-recognition articulated through emerging repertoires of evaluation that takes the name of “reflexive Europeanisation” (55). This is, in a few words, the perspective from which, for fifteen years now, Community policies on the enhancement of European cultural heritages have been moving. Within a conceptual framework in which the term heritage does not identify a simple legacy, but rather the use that people make of it, as a cultural, political, and economic resource, both for the present and the future.

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This view dates back to 2005, with the signing of the Faro Convention on the value of cultural heritage for society. The Council of Europe ratified a concept of cultural heritage intended not only as a matter to be preserved, but mainly as an endowment to be reused, reinterpreted and subsequently updated, for driving economic and social development (Council of Europe 2005). Moreover, this has entailed, on the one hand, the promotion of an enlarged and more inclusive idea of heritage, for which the daily and the ordinary have the same value as the monumental. On the other, the value of the recognition does not lie so much in the good itself, but in the meaning that it takes for the society that inherits it. All this, encompassing an additive framework of construction of meaning, which has increasingly rejected static taxonomic principles characterised as a flexible system, in constant evolution.

For this reason, during the last ten years, researches in this field have progressively been oriented towards the development of new methodologies for the transformation, use and management of neglected or marginalised heritages, with particular attention to those characterised by divergent, when not divisive, interpretations. If it is true, as Brian Graham and Peter Howard wrote (2008), that heritages are constituted by the meanings and representations that are transmitted through the artefacts, landscapes, mythologies, memories and traditions of the past, it is also true that, from a social point of view, the correspondence between a heritage and its meaning is no longer univocal.

From the beginning of the 1990s, for example, a certain idea of dissonance has been opposing the traditional consensual conception of the past developed in the previous century. Moreover, recently, the daily emergence of numerous cases of conflictual, contested and contentious heritages has made this gap even more evident. It is not surprising, therefore, that for design culture, and especially the architectural one, this issue represents a central issue when dealing with the transformation of heritage. In many cases, the social value of the past traces that can be found in territories, cities and artefacts is no longer given as granted. It is a factor that needs to be built through a reflection on the meanings of these traces. This requires the recognition of a process of memory-making that today no longer necessarily develops along the axes of reconciliation and sharing, but needs a further investigation in this regard.

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Dealing with Difficult Heritages The traumatic events that marked the history of many countries all around the world in the last century have decreed a huge proliferation of the forms of conservation of memories and studies dedicated to this theme, to raise a collective sensibility that could prevent the recurrence of similar tragedies. As stated by Pierre Nora back in 1989, the imperative of our epoch seems to be that of preserving every indicator of remembrance (Nora 1989, 14), in a frenetic attempt to counter amnesia.

The obsession with the disappearance of public memory (Macdonald 2013, 1) and the need to commemorate and preserve traces of difficult pasts increase accordingly to the emerging of revisionist and negationist voices. The debate is particularly intense in Europe, where stronger is the clash between those who aim to promote a shared identity, those who claim that particularisms and cultural diversities must prevail, and, finally, those who notice that most of the conceptual frameworks required for writing European history stress national differences, rather than laying the foundation of a European collective identity (Berger 2009).

A consequence of these profound divergences of views is the frequent recourse in memory studies to terms that include a negation, i.e., nonsites of memory (Sendyka 2016), or emphasise a substantial or lurking criticality. Scholars and stakeholders debate about heritage using the adjectives conflictual, contested, contentious, difficult, critical, dissonant, displaced, neglected, agonistic, orphan, etc. Although an exhaustive taxonomy is probably not possible, it is worth reflecting on the meaning of some of these words, in order to open reflections on the current design policies and practices for built heritages and cultural landscapes related to a multi-scalar notion of place.

In 1996, John E. Tunbridge and Gregory John Ashworth introduced the concept of dissonance to highlight an intrinsic feature of heritage, i.e., its belonging to some segments of societies, and the inevitable exclusion of others. Discordances derived from what should be preserved, impose to carefully evaluate the overall consequences of the disinheritance over a long period (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996, 21). An extreme, though also especially influential and sensitive kind of dissonant legacy is, they argue, the “heritage of atrocity.” Places or artefacts related to traumas provoke 12

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intense emotions and have significant effects on the self-conscious identity of individuals or social and political groups.1 Moreover, their interpretation is particularly complex due to the opposing positions of victims, perpetrators, and observers (94–95). Frequently, the blurring distinction between sites of perpetration and sites of oppression further complicates their museographical conservation and the need of finding the best way to present their nature and past to a multifarious public, potentially including people sympathising with the persecutors and their ideology.

In an influential text, Sharon Macdonald mentioned the question labelling as “sites of perpetration at the distance” those places which are “part of the apparatus of perpetration but not locations in which suffering was directly inflicted.” She continued affirming that [w]hile all sites of atrocity raise difficulties of public presentation — including the question of how graphically suffering is depicted — there are some specific dilemmas raised by sites of perpetration at a distance. In particular, precisely because heritage-presentation and museumification are typically regarded as markers of worthwhile history — of heritage that deserves admiration or commemoration — their preservation and public display might be interpreted as conferring legitimacy of a sort. (Macdonald 2009, 3)

Sites of atrocity and sites of perpetration at a distance could be more generally defined with the expression difficult heritage, coined by Macdonald to refer to “a past that is recognised as meaningful in the present but that is also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming contemporary identity” (Macdonald 2009, 1).

Difficult heritages are problematic because they are divisive, threatening “to break through into the present in disruptive ways, opening up social divisions, perhaps by playing into imagined, even nightmarish, futures” (ibid.). Their impact on the evolution of collective and national identities 1. Sites associated with wars, genocides, human death, disasters or other macabre episodes are also identified as dark heritages especially in studies focusing on present-day forms of tourism — thanatourism or dark tourism (Seaton 1996; Lennon and Foley 2000; Stone 2006).

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Towards New Memorial Practices Michela Bassanelli

Each remembrance culture is based on the repetition of performative processes (commemorative ceremonies, rites and rituals, spectacles and other cultural events), on which its cultural coherence depends as much as shared access to the past. Memory thus relates to a mediated interpretation of corporeality, since the set of gestures, that actively engage individuals in the elaboration of a personal and collective past, constitutes the so-called social practices of memory.

(Cati 2013, 19–20)

In recent years, reflections on the memorial object and its physical and conceptual transformation have assumed a central role in the debate on the transmission of memory, especially if linked to dramatic, controversial and disputed episodes in the European history of the twentieth century.

Before we analyse the change this form has taken over time, it is necessary to explain the etymological meaning of the word. Memorial derives from the Latin memoriàlem — concerning memory — and is used in Italian to indicate both a text and a memory stone, or a monument. One of the first times the term appears in Italian is in the biblical translation, where the term “memorial” is used to translate the Hebrew zikkaron (‫)ןורכז‬, from the root zakar (‫)רכז‬, to remember. The word entered the common language since the end of the World War II when it slowly began to replace the word monument.

In the past ten years, critics (Caruth 1995; Anzte and Lambek 1996; Edkins 2003) have focused on a particular aspect of memory that concerns traumatic and uncomfortable events: “If the 1980s were the decade of a 28

I. THEMES

Towards New Memorial Practices

happy postmodern pluralism, the 1990s seemed to be haunted by trauma as the dark underside of neoliberal triumphalism” (Huyssen 2003, 8).

In particular, the Shoah event represented “a radical historical crisis of testimony and the unprecedented, inconceivable historical case of an event without witnesses — an event that eliminates its own witnesses” (Busch 2007, 549). Auschwitz is considered as the emblematic place of the twentieth century memory that marked an epochal break in the forms of commemoration. From the traumatic interpretation of the events that marked the twentieth century arise the concepts of forgetful memory (Fussell 1984), broken memory1 and silent memory (Tarpino 2008) related to the impossibility of expressing the trauma suffered in words.

In the aftermath of the end of the World War II, those tragedies that had hit the population slowly re-emerged. In a moment dominated by the need for collective oblivion, the artists challenged the theme of broken memory and trauma in a provocative way. Boltanski’s artworks focus on the concept of loss as they often use piled-up objects to underline this value. His works aim at displaying an absence, as in the case of the Maison Manquante (1990) or the exhibition Widerstand (1993) at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The artist covered the facade of the building and walls in the city with images of the eyes of people who opposed the German Nazis and, therefore, were killed. Other well-known works show piles of used clothes: “In those accumulations of personal effects, of little residues that become small relics, there is the present, with its daily losses, and there is the past, even a tragic past like the Jewish destruction” (Pirazzoli 2010). The cycle of photographs Asservate (1995) by Naomi Tereza Salmon depicts in an almost aseptic way daily objects of the victims of the genocide: “remembrance monuments are silent witnesses of the crime” (Assmann 2002, 419). Fabio Mauri also dedicated many of his works to the themes of war, fascism, the Shoah and the recovery of historical memory.

One of the most significant artworks is the Western Wall or Wailing Wall (1993), a four-meter high wall formed by old suitcases that symbolise any exile and diaspora. The suitcase represents the individual with his/ 1. The definition of broken memory embraces the concept of “crushed cultural memory” that Aleida Assmann addresses in the text Remember referring in particular to the work of four artists born after the World War II: Anselm Kiefer, Sigrid Sigurdsson, Anne and Patrick Poirier.

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The Adaptive Reuse of Neglected Buildings Francesca Lanz

Contested Spaces, Concerted Projects — we read in the book’s editorial statement — “collects the stories of some selected cases of contentious built heritage, in order to highlight the most innovative methodologies of re-activation” with the aim to explore the role of design practices in such a process. The idea of “re-activation” introduced by the editors implies a process of the reuse and re-valuing of something, be it a building, a site, a memory, an emotion or a behaviour, which has been inactive or dormant, but that can be brought to bear on a new situation.

What happens when the item to be reused is too complicated to be reused? When it is too much entangled in its past, burdened by the awkward feelings and memories associated with it, which are recalled in and by its physical form? Too much embroiled in different and conflicting contemporary interpretations of those pasts and memories it catalyses?

When all that makes it no longer possible to be left to neglect yet nor ready to be reprocessed and re-activated: which kind of reuse, if any, shall be pursued for such complex, built inheritances?

In this chapter, I avail myself of the idea of adaptive reuse and I will refine it to consider how architectural interventions and other designed forms of reuse can contribute to a process of re-activation of this kind of disused buildings, which I am going to name “neglected buildings.” By presenting different possible approaches to the adaptive reuse of these buildings, I will explore what these interventions might do, at what extent they are determined by the nature of the building, which are their possible hindrances, and what possibilities they may rise.

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Adaptive Reuse: Not a Definition Despite being an established architectural practice since at least the 1970s, in the past ten years, “adaptive reuse” has become a buzzword in the contemporary architectural debate. Within the architectural design circle, and somehow beyond it, the interest in adaptive reuse is growing. Today, it is widely considered as a relevant research field, a promising professional strand, and an important subject for architectural practice and teaching. Around the world, adaptive reuse of historic buildings is considered as fundamental to sound government policy and sustainable development. Worldwide a growing number of adaptive reuse interventions are variously developed and both small and big architectural firms are increasingly inclined to working on pre-existing buildings.

Around Europe and overseas, specific architectural design study courses have been opened by some pioneering universities, while focused modules and thematic masters are more and more part of the training offer of many others.1 Meanwhile, a growing number of research projects, funded at both national and international levels, are investigating the topic from different perspectives.2 At the same time, and partially because of this increasing interest in the matter, publications devoted to adaptive reuse are increasing as well. They encompass a wide variety of contributions and scholarly studies, including articles in international journals and architectural magazines, monographs, handbooks, edited volumes, conference papers, proceedings and research 1. E.g., The international Master of Interior Architecture “Adaptive Reuse. Exploring Spatial Potentialities & the Poetics of the Existing” at Hasselt University; the Master of Arts in Adaptive Reuse at the Rhode Island School of Design; the MA Programme “Continuity in Architecture” at the Manchester School of Architecture or the MS “Architecture, Built Environment, Interiors” at Politecnico di Milano.

2. Recent examples include: the international research project Open Heritage: Organizing, Promoting and Enabling Heritage Reuse through Inclusion, Technology, Access, Governance and Empowerment, funded in 2019 by the EU under the H2020 Research and Innovation Programme, https://openheritage.eu (accessed January 2020); the national research project ReCyle Italy that run from 2012 to 2015 and was funded by the Italian Ministry for Education and Instruction, https://recycleitaly.net/ (accessed January 2020); the research project ReMIND — Reactivating Neglected Heritages, Reweaving Unspoken Memories: A Study on the Adaptive Reuse of Former Asylums into “Mind Museums,” funded in 2019 by the EU under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship Programme, https://research.ncl.ac.uk/remind (accessed January 2020).

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Exhibiting Fragile Memories A Discussion with Leonardo Sangiorgi from Studio Azzurro Marcella Camponogara

Studio Azzurro represents one of the best examples in Italy of research and experimentation on exhibition design, not only for the original use of new technologies but also for the great attention they pay to the relational aesthetics of the virtual. Born in the 1980s, during the collapse of ideologies and media libertinism, the firm founded by Paolo Rosa, Fabio Cirifino and Leonardo Sangiorgi began to conduct artistic experiments to reason about the changes that technologies were causing in the way of perceiving and feeling the self into the world. For this reason, over the years, through various intersections with theater, cinema and dance, their work has always focused on the construction of a participatory and technologically mediated public space through exhibition design.

Moreover, even though the attention to the human condition is a transversal constant of all their projects, two of them are particularly significant concerning conflicting or controversial perspectives on different historical memories and experiences: two permanent exhibition designs for two Italian museums — one about the experience of war, and the other about mental illness.

The first one, located in Fosdinovo, a small village between Tuscany and Liguria, is the Audiovisual Museum of the Resistance (Museo Audiovisivo della Resistenza), that represents one of the first museum designs by Studio Azzurro (2000), and was realised thanks to the determination of the people who experienced World War II and took part in the Italian resistance movement. These people asked Studio Azzurro to design a museum that was not “a museum full of nostalgia, but something relevant to young people,” to turn “the significance of that experience […]

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into heritage for everyone” (Cirifino, Giardina Papa and Rosa 2011, 51).

Therefore, they proposed a design made of projectors and a large table on which documents of that time could be activated, read and browsed.

In this way, when visitors approach the table, they are faced with large screens on which the faces of the men and women who lived during the war and resistance appear. Each of them narrates his or her own story in a personal and almost intimate dialogue with the viewer, as people’s memories vivify the documents of the official history. Thus, through the use of digital equipment, one has the possibility not only to learn and keep significant memories alive but also to relate them to the real protagonists, thus passing from an anonymous vision of history to a lively and shared dimension. All takes place through the emphasis on the rediscovery of an oral tradition, which can transform, through the use of technological devices, a place of memory “into a place for participation” (2011, 51).

On the other hand, the second one, the Laboratory Museum of Mind (Museo Laboratorio della Mente), opened in Rome in 2008, inside a building that used to be a mental hospital. A part was converted into a museum dedicated to the traditional treatment of mental illness and the other into a laboratory for experimenting with new ideas on mental health.

The purpose was to make visitors feel how difficult and unjust it was to draw a line between normality and disease without feeling empathy. For this reason, Studio Azzurro’s design stressed multi-dimensional and sensorial aspects to provide this experience with a strong emotional charge. The exhibition area, for example, is divided into seven areas dedicated to mental disease, that engage the visitor in a game of mirrors and references, who can feel a sensation of disorientation and loss of identity. Furthermore, the visiting itinerary is marked by a transparent wall that produces in the viewer the feeling of being on one side or the other of a certain environment, as it was the limit of normality. Following this line, visitors arrive in front of three rooms placed next to each other, which display three installations. Here they can make interactive experiences such as testing their senses and descending into the psychophysical dimension of being a patient of the hospital, thus changing their role “from observers to… being observed” (2011, 135). In this way, the visitor gets progressively acquainted with the theme of mental distress and he/she can continue to reflect on the concepts of marginalisation and integration.

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MC: Is there any relationship between personal and collective experiences?

LS: Yes, absolutely, it works just like that. We have an issue about authorship that we must face, as we are going towards a sort of shared authorship since the final director is the user. The one we were used to calling the author actually creates a box, a box of which the end-user is both the protagonist and the spectator. It is precisely here that lies the multiplicity of what we do. We have abandoned one linear direction. When you place an element in a space and give people the possibility to have different points of view, they react in different ways. In addition, with interactivity, you can make people live the experience individually. For us, the artist, the researcher, is not a hermit on a mountain. We are just in the middle of the market square; we want to be in the market square. We have done nothing but give space to the collective unconscious.

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Studio Azzurro, exhibition design for the Audiovisual Museum of the Resistance (Museo Audiovisivo della Resistenza), Fosdinovo, 2000. © Studio Azzurro.

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Challenging Hegemonic “Truths” A Conversation with Eyal Weizman and Sarah Nankivell from Forensic Architecture Cristina F. Colombo

Forensic Architecture (FA)1 is a multidisciplinary research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, founded in 2010 by Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures. A team of architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, artists, scientists and lawyers collaborates with an extended network of external researchers to advanced spatial and media investigations into cases of human rights abuses, with and on behalf of communities affected by political violence, human rights associations, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups, and media organisations. The United Nations (UN), Amnesty International, European Human Rights Advocacy Centre (EHRAC), Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Human Rights Watch, B’tselem, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, are some of the promoters and partners of their enquiries.

The name of the agency refers to an original research approach, merging the theoretical frameworks of architecture and forensic sciences to develop new evidentiary techniques. They define this method “counterforensics.”2 Moving from the idea that built environment is both the 1. Forensic Architecture, accessed September 30, 2019, https://forensic-architecture.org/.

2. The term was first introduced by artist Allan Sekula in the essay “Photography and the Limits of National Identity” (Sekula 1993), hinting at the adoption of forensic techniques as a practice of “political maneuvering.” Thomas Keenan later developed the notion, with reference to Sekula’s work: “Today, if forensics — in common parlance — refers both to the scientific investigation of physical and digital objects (including documents and photographs as well bodies, bones, bombs, bullets, and buildings) and to the presentation of those objects as evidence in legal proceedings, then counter-forensics refers to all sorts of efforts designed to frustrate or prevent in advance the analysis of those objects” (Keenan 2014, 68).

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means of violation and a “material witness” of the historical events that traversed it (Weizman et al. 2010), FA is committed to the production and presentation of architectural evidence relating to buildings, and/or urban environments, within legal and political processes.

The équipe enquires into cases of violence, contemporary conflicts, human-rights infractions, and persecutions. It uses a variety of techniques to collect proofs and then reconstruct the events: spatial and material analysis, photographic surveys, situated testimony, satellite images, photogrammetry, mapping, 3D modelling, visual and audio documentation enabled by contemporary media. Their targets focus on multiple scales and extend worldwide.

The outcomes of the researches are primarily presented into international legal and political forums — courtrooms, parliaments, UN assemblies, etc.

Still, they open up to further critical debates and ethical stances that have been discussed in the context of academic circles, public seminars and exhibitions, not without considerable political repercussions. Hence, the dual aim of their work: to investigate the truth — facts and responsibilities — and confute false reports, tendentious revisionisms and delegitimisation of memories. As Weizman stated, FA intends forensic architecture as “a counter-hegemonic practice able to invert the relation between individuals and states, to challenge and resist state and corporate violence and the tyranny of their truth” (Weizman 2014, 11).

In the article “Violence at the Threshold of detectability” (Weizman 2015), Weizman indicates the report compiled by Robert Jan van Pelt for the trial, which opposed David Irving to Deborah E. Lipstad and Penguin Books Ltd.3 as a primary inspiration for the agency Forensic Architecture. A particularly critical issue was at stake there: the attempt to use material evidence — or the absence of evidence — to confute survivors’ testimonies and, as posed by the researcher, “a desire to preclude the very ability of the witnesses to speak to history at all” (02).

FA did not further investigate the case, but has been working on other situations dealing with abuses perpetrated at the “threshold of 3. The Robert Jan van Pelt Report is report is available at: “Trial Materials,” Holocaust Denial on Trial, https://www.hdot.org/vanpelt_toc (accessed September 30, 2019). An extended version of the report was later published (van Pelt 2002).

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Forensic Architecture, “Umm al-Hiran,” Umm al Hiran, Negev/Naqab desert. Date of incident 18.01.2017. Produced in collaboration with ActiveStills and the village of Umm al-Hiran, with support from the Israeli Communist Party and the Joint Arab List in the Israeli Parliament (Knesset).

Mapping the motion of journalist Keren Manor’s camera, her footage paints a panorama of the incident, allowing the accurate placement of vehicles and figures in a 3D site model. © Forensic Architecture, 2018 with footage by Keren Manor / Activestills.

Photogrammetry and 3D modelling were used to reconstruct the scene in order to track the movement of the car and location of policemen and to calculate the terrain slope, speed, and distances at each moment of the event. © Forensic Architecture, 2018. (following)

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Anna — Monumento all’Attenzione An Interview with Gianni Moretti Michela Bassanelli

In the contemporary world, it is possible to recognise the existence of a movement aimed at seeking new commemorative forms that go alongside the classic ones, such as monuments and memorials, which can overcome the pure commemoration typical of traditional structures. For this reason, more often on the initiative of individual authors (architects and/or artists), or associations, further experimental investigations on new commemorative forms have been launched. Attempts have been made or to overcome the institutional task assigned to traditional commemorative forms or to innovate their formal typologies in fashions that better satisfy new needs that the memory of conflicts requires in order to be transmitted and shared beyond nationalist rhetoric and beyond the needs dictated by the urgency of the memory. A fundamental role is played by the numerous material and immaterial traces that are present in our cities and our territories. These constitute a map of stories and memories — in some cases minor or marginal — from which has stemmed the experimentation of new intervention models capable of going beyond the commemorative task. Anna — Monumento all’Attenzione (Anna — Monument to Attention) of Gianni Moretti moves precisely in this direction. Between art and landscape, it aims at the direct engagement of people in the commemorative process to overcome the oblivion embodied in the nature of the monument itself; to the activation of interactions with the spectator capable of promoting active and productive memories instead of passive and mournful ones; to the promotion of reconciliation processes that do not remove the trauma but help to rework it, introducing it into the circle of daily life; an indispensable reappropriation that allows moving forward without forgetting the past.

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Michela Bassanelli: The title of your artwork contains a meaningful purpose concerning the word “attention.” Can you tell us about the birth and scope of your intervention?

Gianni Moretti: In 2013, I presented a project in Bologna during the SetUp fair called Bell’ra (Studies for a Monument to Attention), a project for a monument to be built in Milan dedicated to a woman victim of femicide. The project was based on a sort of mimesis with the location.

During the day, it looked like a simple display case of opal glass, while at night, one could see the projection of an imprisoned moth. My goal was to work on something that does not impose itself at first sight, but that one encounters casually. This is the same concept that underlines the Sant’Anna monument. Silent and discreet, the monument I imagined is a dream that awakens consciences, which kindly invites reflection or, as described in the title, attention. Attention is as much a cognitive process directed to a specific object as it is synonymous with care and concern.

My exercise contains both definitions; it invites concentration, thought and, at the same time, it focuses on one of the most compelling social issues, it serves it, enriches it, brings it to the attention of others.

MB: Sant’Anna di Stazzema is a place full of memories where it is possible to trace the history and a memorial evolution: there is the ossuary monument, the Via Crucis that leads to the monument and a museum rearranged in recent years. Can you tell us how your monument fits and, at the same time, stands out?

GM: The genesis of the monument was complex. In 2015 I was contacted

by Luigi Ficacci — the Superintendent for Cultural Heritage — to plan a monument in memory of the victims of the Nazi-Fascist massacre of August 12, 1944. I, therefore, asked myself: How can I add something to what has already been said by the artists who worked here since the 1970s? How can I respect the memories it contains?

Before I started, I asked myself three questions: What is a monument today? How do we keep the memory alive? What right do I have to deal with this issue?

I don’t belong to that specific territory, I haven’t lost any loved one in that 193

Michela Bassanelli

Gianni Moretti, study for a monument, 2019. Xerographic monotype on flimsy paper with applied sequin golden leaf, 50x35 cm. © Gianni Moretti, Montrasio Arte Monza and Milan.

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Gianni Moretti, study for a monument, 2019. Xerographic monotype on flimsy paper, 50x70 cm. © Gianni Moretti, Montrasio Arte Monza and Milan.

Gianni Moretti, study for a monument, 2019. Xerographic monotype on flimsy paper with pigment deposit, 50x70 cm. © Gianni Moretti, Montrasio Arte Monza and Milan.

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