2 letters on Memory
Collective Biography
Dear Amos,
We are used to consider Memory and History as two opposite spheres. One, memory, is always related to an individual perspective on the past. The other, history, is connected with a collective and more “objective” dimension of the past.
In your recent works, you are deforming this approach. Through the historical reconstruction of the affective and cultural relations which have been bridged your family, you’ve redesigned entire sections of the 20th Century European history.
Is this “collective” biography the best contemporary device to detect the geopolitical changes? Is this attention to the family a key to decipher the turbulences of our recent history? Or is your perspective strictly related to your personal, specific, unique story? Is “collective” memory the best material for a new kind of History?
All the best,
Stefano
Dear Stefano,
It has been almost twenty years that
We have carried this dialogue.
Architecture and memory,
Architecture and it’s traces.
It’s ruins,
If you like.
It may have been that this sensation sent
Me away from practicing architecture in a land that construction
At this point of time is sometimes more harmful than
It’s absence.
What is memory in this age
In which layers are erased
In an over growing speed
And Meaningful architectural edifices
Loose their relevance almost instantly as soon as they are erected.
Memory is also about rhythm
About interpretation and NOT consumption
And our age of mechanical reproduction.
And here stands Munio and Efratia
My parents
With their visions, Utopias and parcours
Europe and the mighty ever going Middle East
Sources of references and some opposition to the present.
Let’s keep talking for some twenty more years or more.
Yours,
Amos Gitai
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