Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Home
  • Artwork
    • Selected Works
    • Galleries
      • A Moment’s Language
      • Installations
        • Murder
        • The Woods, Breathing
        • The Woods, Breathing (Texts)
      • Photographs
        • The Trees
        • Shotover
        • Pillars of Snow
        • Places
        • Textures
        • Walk to work
        • Creatures
      • Photographic Installations
        • St. Giles Fair 1908
        • Cornmarket 1907
        • Headington Hill 1903
        • Queen Street 1897
        • Snow (details)
        • The Wall
      • Stitched Work
        • ‘Missded’ Tokens
        • ‘Missded’ 1 – Tokens
        • ‘Missded’ 2 – Tokens
        • ‘Missded’ 3 – Tokens
      • Miscellaneous
        • Remembered Visit to Birkenau
        • Somewhere Between Writing and Trees
        • Tracks
        • Portfolio
        • Posters for Exhibitions
        • T (Crosses)
        • Backdrops
        • Correspondence (details)
    • Continuing Themes
      • Missded
      • Lists
      • Heavy Water Sleep
      • The Trees
      • The Gentleman’s Servant
      • Fragment
      • Notebook
  • Blog
  • Exhibitions
    • The Space Beyond Us
    • Kaleidoscope
    • A Line Drawn in Water
    • A Line Drawn in Water (Blog)
    • Mine the Mountain 3
    • Mine the Mountain 2
    • The Woods, Breathing
    • Snow
    • Echo
    • Murder
    • The Tourist
    • Dreamcatcher
    • Mine the Mountain
    • M8
    • Umbilical Light
    • The Gate
    • Creatures
    • Residue
    • A visit to Auschwitz
  • Video
    • The Gone Forest
    • Look, trees exist
    • Look, trees exist (WWI postcard)
    • Videos from ‘A Line Drawn in Water’
  • Family History
  • About Me
  • Subscribe to Nicholas Hedges
  • Eliot Press

Berlin – City of Voids

February 4, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Berlin is a place I’ve wanted to visit for some time now, but one which, despite its history, remains quite unfamiliar to me. It is of course, a city synonymous with 20th century conflict, both through its partioning in the Cold War and as the place from which the Nazis directed years of murder and terror throughout Europe, and yet, despite this, it’s always stood somehow on the periphery of all that I know. Of course, that might just have been because I’d never been there, and yet, even after visiting, the true character of Berlin remains something of an enigma.

My knowledge of the city was pretty much limited to the Cold War divide, to the fall of the wall in 1989, and the tyrannical rule of the Nazis. I had also recently read something about the city in Andreas Huyssen’s book, ‘Present Pasts – Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory’ in which, in a few chapters he discusses the renewal of Berlin in the wake of the collapse of communism. His view of the regeneration of the city is one that is rather pessimistic. He writes that ‘many of the major construction projects seem to have been designed against the city rather than for it. Some of them look like corporate spaceships reminiscent of the conclusion of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The trouble is, they’re here to stay.’

It’s striking that after being destroyed by Allied bombs and an ideological schism which took the world to the brink of a third world war, one regrets (at least Huyssen does) the permanence of its new structures. But I understand how he feels. Berlin is an ugly city.

Berlin

In his beautifully evocative work Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald writes:

“At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct the outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence in ruins.”

Look at the great stone buildings in any city and one can see exactly what is meant in this passage. And yet, in present day Berlin, there are few new buildings which one could imagine as a ruin. They are constructs of glass and steel, they would melt rather than fall, or shatter into millions of pieces. They cast no shadow – the sun passes through them as it does through high clouds in summer. They might one day burn away, but not through cataclysm or catastrophe, but simply through the fact that no-one will bother to look anymore. One’s eyes already find their way through to the other side.
Huyssen continues the passage above; ‘The void in the centre of Berlin will have been filled [he was writing in 1997]. But the memories of that haunting space from the months and years after the Wall came down will linger.’

In Berlin, history seems to creep up on you. Such is the level of trauma suffered by the city, it seems at first to forget itself, to be unaware of its own name. The visitor just arrived might walk its streets but they seem somehow unconnected, like individual roads recalled from other destinations. One walks but doesn’t have the feeling of going anywhere (something in part due to the lack on any particular centre). And yet, the more one questions the city with feet and roving eyes, the more the city begins to recall. At first it might remember just the names of its streets, those which are unconnected, as if a map of the city had been torn to pieces and its names read in fragments picked off the floor. It does not speak its memories aloud, but keeps quiet. There is I believe, a palpable sense of its history being a history of fear.

The Stasi, the infamous secret police of the GDR, have long since gone, but somehow one suspects that memory – which also in part seems to have been dismantled – has nonetheless its wiretaps, interrogation rooms and networks still intact. This decommissioned memory had long listened in on those who walked the streets, who sat in cafés, pored over maps and slept in hotel bedrooms, but now it is us that ask the questions, who attempt to listen. We can look upon its files, listen to the recordings made through its intricate devices. But everything seems disconnected. Memories seem fractured, just like the city itself. There is a caesura which exists between the past and the present, as if the wall, demolished in the city has somehow been rebuilt between them, as if the wide expanse of no-man’s land separates today from all that has gone before. And all these buildings built upon it do nothing to bridge this gap.
According to Huyssen, ‘the one architect who understood the nature of this empty space in the centre of Berlin was Daniel Liebskind, who, in 1992, made the following proposal.

“Rilke once said that everything is already there. We only must see it and protect it. We must develop a feel for places, streets, and houses which need our support. Take the open area at the Potsdamer Platz. I suggest a wilderness, one kilometer long, within which everything can stay as it is. The street simply ends in the bushes. Wonderful. After all, this area is the result of today’s divine natural law: nobody wanted it, nobody planned it, and yet it is firmly implanted in all our minds. And there in our minds, this image of the Potsdamer Platz void will remain for decades. Something like that cannot be easily erased, even if the whole area will be developed.”‘

As I said, I had little conception of what to expect of Berlin, but Potsdamer Platz has now been developed and in a sense Liebskind’s statement is true. The void cannot easily be erased and even though the area has been built upon, the buildings still convey a sense of emptiness. Perhaps memory should remain quiet despite our questions, perhaps through saying nothing it conveys much more than it ever could through words. Perhaps the city’s new buildings have been designed this way on purpose?
One building which cannot be said to be like any of those I’ve described (in general terms) above (at least in its exterior appearance), is the Jewish Museum (Judisches Museum) designed by Daniel Liebskind.

Berlin

If ever there was a compliment to the spaces and voids which still exist in the physical aspect of the city, it is the history of the country’s Jewish population and Liebskind’s building – if not all its contents – allude starkly to that tragedy. It is a dark and foreboding structure which has no visible entrance (it is accessed through the adjacent Berlin Museum), and once inside, this sense of foreboding is conveyed through its corridors or, as they’re known – axis. What intrigued me most however as we made our way through the building, into the Holocaust Tower (itself a brilliantly evocative installation), back out and up to one of the building’s ‘voids'(home to an installation by Menashe Kadishman’s ‘Shalechet’) was how this building was not just housing an exhibition/display, but was itself an integral part of the story.

Berlin

In fact, as far as I was concerned, this building needed no contents; it is perhpas worthwhile stating that before the contents of the exhibitions were installed, 300,000 people came to visit the building anyway.
Huyssen states that the ‘…building has become a script. His building itself writes the discontinuous narrative that is Berlin, inscribes it physically into the very movement of the museum visitor and yet opens a space for remembrance to be articulated and read between the lines.” I would not disagree with any of this, however, I would say, that the exhibition itself hampers this overall effect. There is just too much information, too much too see, it is at odds with the building in terms of the style in which it is presented. The question is I think, ‘is this building a museum or a memorial?’ At the moment it doesn’t seem to know.

Berlin

Something which knows exactly what it is, is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Of course there is controversy (one of many surrounding the project) as to why this memorial is only dedicated to one of the many groups persecuted by the Nazis, however, I do not wish to go into this matter here. What is worth looking at is the memorial above ground and its counterpart museum space below. When I first saw the memorial I must admit to feeling – despite its size – a little under-whelmed. I can’t say why, but it seemed a little messy somehow, a tad haphazard. Of course it is neither of these things but that is the impression it gave. However, when entering the memorial, this feeling changes, and in a sense that is part of its success. It pulls you in, it’s not something which can simply be observed and then left, it has to be experienced and understood.

Berlin

There is no definite beginning to the memorial. On the outside the stones are like the slabs of an individual tomb, but as one walks past others towards an opposing side, one quickly becomes dwarfed by the huge blocks in the centre. This for me resonates with something in which I’m particularly interested; the opposing poles of the individual and mass. The stones themselves – those towards the centre – are like the tombs one finds in a necropolis. But they are not named, the individual has quickly become effaced. And even though there are hundreds of these massive blocks, one is never lost amongst them, one can always see the other side. There is no mystery to the monument, it does not have the mystery of a maze or a labyrinth. We will find our way out. We can see the other side whereas none of the victims in their nightmare could. We walked into it as easily as Europe walked into atrocity, but reason – the other side – should always see that we never become lost again.
The museum below takes the shapes of the stones above and uses them throughout its displays, which, unlike the displays in the Jewish Museum, are perfectly weighted. In fact the whole experience is neither too long or too short. It’s simple and utterly compelling. In particular, the displays of families, including snapshots of happier times are devastating.

Berlin

And the room in which the names of individuals are displayed and a short biography read out is measured and particularly poignant. When one finally leaves the museum and emerges back within the memorial, the stones take on further meanings; each becomes a family group, reduced to nothing but a void realized in stone. Other people visiting the memorial appear ahead, or to the side, fleetingly to then disappear again in a moment; all part of the monument’s design.

Berlin

There were however other memorials dotted throughout the city, and perhaps the most poignant were those in Große Hamburger Straße. In the pavement, outside the former dwellings of Jews killed in the Holocaust, gold cobbles bearing the names of the victims and the location of their deaths have been installed. These simple, small yet visible monuments connect the person observing with the intimate lives of those who perished and in many ways reminded me of the plaques one finds on some of the schools in Paris. It is both as compelling and as heartbreaking to see the places from where people were taken, as it is to see the dreadful places they were taken to, and these cobbles are heartrending for that precise reason.

Also there was the work by artist Christian Boltanski, also on Große Hamburger Straße, ‘The Missing House’. This piece shows the names of residents on the walls of the houses either side which are of course still standing, and like the cobbles it’s poignant in how it links those who perished with dwellings which have also disappeared; another example of the city’s voids.

Berlin

Flying over Berlin, on my way back home, looking at the the tens of thousands of streetlights and the lights of buildings glittering below, I couldn’t help but think of the fires which raged throughout the city in the second world war. Every light was like the memory of the flames; fires now confined within glass spheres and tubes. And in between the lights are the dark patches, the voids which have burned themselves out. Berlin is indeed a city of voids and no amount of building will hide them; but then, perhaps that is the point.

Filed Under: Holocaust Tagged With: Andreas Huyssen, Berlin, Boltanski, Holocaust, Memorials, Sebald, WWII

Forgetting

January 7, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Today I started work on my Dreamcatcher installation which will be installed in Modern Art Oxford in March 2008 as part of the Brookes Exhibition which runs for approximately nine days. Part of the installation comprises hundreds of drawings which I will wallpaper on the walls of a room, and in preparation for a trial version of the piece I created about 100 drawings this morning. And it was whilst making these drawings that I became aware of how, after a while, my hand seemed to be working quite independently of my mind. The lines of the drawing had come to form a pattern of sorts and my hand was simply going through the motions, churning out images not of the gate tower of Auschwitz-Birkenau per se, but rather drawings of drawings of the gate-tower of Auschwitz-Birkenau. My memory had become a pattern and although this did at first disconcert me, in the end I came to see it as something positive, insofar as my work on memory and memorials is concerned.

In his book ‘Present Pasts – Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory,’ Andreas Huyssen asks:

“Is it the fear of forgetting that triggers the desire to remember, or is it perhaps the other way around? Could it be that the surfeit of memory in this media-saturated culture creates such overload that the memory system itself is in constant danger of imploding, thus triggering fear of forgetting?”

I would take this further and suggest that the overload of the memory system does not necessarily trigger a fear of forgetting, but rather it triggers forgetting itself. I was also reminded of Frances A. Yates’ book ‘The Art of Memory’ in which she discusses Socrates’ story of the invention of writing by the God Theuth.

“In the Phaedrus; Socrates tells the story of the God Theuth who invented numbers and arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, draughts and dice, and most importantly of all, letters. The king of all Egypt was the God Thamus who told Theuth that the invention of writing was not, as suggested, an elixir of memory and wisdom, but of reminding; the invention will produce forgetfulness.”

If one equates my line drawings with text, one can see how the re-remembering of the memory of Auschwitz-Birkenau through drawing has resulted (at least whilst making the drawings) in that memory being forgotten. What I’m actually remembering is not my visit, but a memory of that visit. And as such these drawings are somehow equivalent to post-memories; memories we might have of the Holocaust which of course we never experienced.

So what does this mean for the Dreamcatcher work?

The work itself is in part about how we can visit places such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, safe in the knowledge that we can leave; just as we know we’ll always wake from our nightmares. Dreams and nightmares will eventually fade – they will be forgotten; they are unreal, much like our own post-memories of unwitnessed events.

So what is brought into question therefore is how best to remember atrocities such as Auschiwtz, the Holocaust and War in general?

Filed Under: Holocaust Tagged With: Andreas Huyssen, Dreamcatcher, Frances Yates, Holocaust, WW2, WWII

Maps and Walking

March 16, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

The main theme of much of my work has so far been the Holocaust and in particular its sites, such as those at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec and Babi Yar. I’ve also been studying memory and how memories within objects and buildings might allow us a glimpse of the past; a theme which has fascinated me ever since I was a child. It was through reading Bill Viola’s writings a few months back that I was reminded of the mnemonic techniques practiced by the ancient Greeks:

“The idea of art as a kind of diagram has for the most part not made it down from the Middle Ages into modern European Consciousness. The Renaissance was the turning point… The structural aspect of art, and the idea of a ‘data-space’ was preserved through the Renaissance however in the continued relations between image and architecture. Painting became an architectural, spatial form which the viewer experienced by physically walking through it. The older concept of an idea and an image architecture, a memory ‘place’ like the mnemonic temples of the Greeks is carried through in the great European cathedrals and palaces, as is the relation between memory, spatial movement and storage (recording) of ideas.”

When I first read this quote, I was at the time researching The University Parks in Oxford, and in particular examining the plaques on the benches. I realised then, that my act of walking and ‘remembering’ those who have passed away, was in a broad and rather loose sense, like walking through one of those ‘mnemonic temples’ albeit in a physical sense. I was constructing a bigger picture of the place.

More recently, walking has started to play an important role in my work on the Holocaust (one of the themes which has struck me through my research has been that of walking. Many photos of the Holocaust show people walking, usually, and tragically, to their deaths). I’ve started to look at the Operation Reinhard camps and in particular Belzec. Laurence Rees, in his book, ‘Auschwitz’, describes the unimaginable scale of death and contrasts it with the disproportionately tiny size of Belzec Death Camp, which measured less less than 300m x 300m. I knew this was a small size, but it wasn’t until I walked around some familiar spaces in Oxford – including the University Parks – that I realised just how small it was.

Since then I’ve started looking for more evidence of the size of Belzec (and other camps) so that I might walk specific distances around the city, and have since discovered a number of maps drawn by survivors, SS men and archaeologists. These roughly sketched maps, these ‘memories,’ are a poignant reminder of the camp’s existence and might help me in my attempts to bring people closer to the Holocaust, which should never be forgotten.

“All things fade away in time, but time itself is made fadeless and undying by recollection.” Apollonius of Tyana
“We have to describe and to explain a building the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tool are found and remnants of glacial fauna is the layers below… Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are ‘housed’.” C.G. Jung
“Memory, whether individual or generational, political or public is always more than the prison house of the past.” Andreas Huyssen

Here I must return to the ancient Greeks and their mnenomic temples. With a place or loci, such as a house, fixed in the mind, the person remembering would place various objects in its rooms (“…what I have spoken of as being done in a house can also be done in public buildings, or on a long journey, or going through a city…”), objects which by association would remind them of part of the whole thing – such as a speech – to be remembered. Here I saw at once a correlation with my work on Belzec. The ancient Greeks were walking as a means of remembering, of not forgetting; their memory loci were in effect maps which one could sketch, maps of the mind. Therefore, the maps drawn by survivors, are in effect maps of their minds and bring us closer to the horrors of the time – closer to the individuals who suffered.

The fact that objects were used to create associations, and therefore build (through ‘walking’) a bigger ‘picture’ of something also fits in with the recent work I’ve been doing on Auschwitz, looking at the possessions left by the victims and trying to build a picture of the individuals before the Holocaust, to see them not only as victims, but people who lived lives before its horror.

Through walking distances which I’ve taken from descriptions of the camp, I have found myself walking back into my own past and the past of the city in general; for example, walking the route of Cuckoo Lane and the Old London Road at Shotover. My own past confirms my individuality and the past of the city confirms my place as a small part in the mass of memories associated with this place (this also correlates with my work on Auschwitz, trying to find the individuals amongst the huge number of dead, individual possessions from amongst the mountains, names rather than inconceivable numbers). The fact these walks have been derived from a map or a description of Belzec, helps me to identify further with the individuals who suffered there; not because I can in anyway conceive of their suffering – no-one could ever imagine the horrors they endured – but because I can imagine their own pasts and that of the places they knew so well, places from which they were taken to their deaths.

Filed Under: Oxford Tagged With: Andreas Huyssen, Auschwitz, Babi Yar, Belzec, Bill Viola, Death Camps, Holocaust, Jung, Laurence Rees, Oxford, Quotes, University Parks, Useful Quotes, WWII

© Nicholas Hedges 2006-20

Subscribe
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Copyright © 2023 · Outreach Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in