Munich. How do politics and architecture interact in the representation of power? What alliances are forged by politics’ need for symbols of prestige and the architects’ desire for recognition? These basic questions have lost none of their relevance since being asked again, in the urbanism debate above all. At the same time, they hold a profound fascination for contemporary artists – above all when built territories are considered as visualised history, where the architectural designs of town planners reflect power structures and the inhabitants leave behind traces of their life practices. In this kind of topological view of history, every housing development is a historically evolved habitat that shapes the way its inhabitants co-exist.
Marginal places in particular can have a varied history, as is always confirmed when they are torn from oblivion. Michaela Melián has followed this kind of investigative impulse. Melián, an artist and musician, has reconstructed the socio-political history of a seemingly insignificant place. The housing development “Föhrenwald”, which was built at the end of the 1930s, is now called “Waldram”. It is situated some 30 kilometres south of Munich. At the time, the urban planners followed National Socialist ideas in the design and lay-out of its communal buildings and private homes. Soon, however, the development was used as a camp for forced labourers, and after the end of the war, homeless survivors of the Holocaust were housed there. Föhrenwald served as a so-called »displaced persons camp« until 1956. In the same year, resettled German families moved into the renovated houses. Since then the appearance of the development has greatly changed. The new residents adapted the place to suit themselves. The function of the communal rooms was redefined – what was a cinema in the post-war camp became a church, for example -, fences were put up, and gardens and entrances were individualised. This new reality of the Federal Republic has also imprinted itself on the architecture, but without being able to obliterate completely the traces of its former usage.
In contrast with deterritorialised places of history like concentration camps, which are preserved for the cultural memory as monuments of the Nazi horror, in reterritorialised places the layers of their changing uses overlie one another. This can also be seen in Föhrenwald, most clearly of all in the way street names have changed. On the whole, however, it leads to local history’s being forgotten. In her artistic appropriation of the place, Michaela Melián tries to counter this forgetting. Her multimedia installation »Föhrenwald« emphasises precisely the phenotypical nature of this model housing development. She uses her knowledge of the history of the development to expose its architectural framework, which the various usages has made unrecognisable particularly for its present-day residents and visitors. At first, she does drawings in which buildings in the development and its immediate surroundings are reduced to their outlines, thus underlining the way they can be read as »built ideology«. This process of deconstruction to reduce complexity has already been tried out by Melián several times to make apparent the connection between architectural surroundings and the life practices of the people who use them. In a second step, these schematic drawings are projected as slides in a specially created room after being reverse processed: in the black box of the temporary exhibition space, a walk-in, cylindrical building put up at the edge of the Hofgarten in Munich, these outline drawings become white traces of light on a circular, black projection surface. The slides move around the darkened room one after the other, gliding restlessly past the viewers like ephemeral images from the memory. This reversal of the usual perception is meant to stop the viewers from trusting these schemes of thought that have been turned into architecture. At the same time, the rotating panoramic slide projection forces them to constantly readjust their gaze: it cannot remain fixed on one image, let alone immerse itself in it. Simultaneously, electronic sounds and voices can be heard in the black box, providing historical information about this visually dissected place. What one hears has been taken from original recordings of former Jewish residents of the Föhrenwald camp, among other things. Their memories are here spoken by professional speakers. These voices are just as ephemeral as the projected images. At the same time, they open up a new level of historical reconstruction: the polyphony of voices, the subjective articulation of memory. This all creates a visually complex and polyphonic installation that reflects the history of the place without falling into one of those traps of meaning to which narrative exhibitions are particularly prone.
This is primarily counteracted by the medial presentation of the visualised history of Föhrenwald that. Unlike the popular panoramas of the 19th century, which presented significant historical events in an illusionistic manner, Melián’s rotating slide projection does not aim to optically overwhelm the viewers. Rather, this popular medium of historicism is modified in an important way. In contrast with the historical panorama, the viewers have to allow their gaze to wander and to remain mobile. At the same time, they listen to the historical “off-screen” voices. This mobility of visual and acoustic perception is what makes it possible to retain a certain distance to the projected images and room-filling voices. In this way, the gaze (and the ear) are attuned more sharply to the ephemeral, the incidental and therefore the often overlooked (and not heard) aspects of this ideologically shaped architecture, to eloquent details such as the jutting-out walls of the houses, which can now be interpreted as fortified defences. Melián’s artistic appropriation of history recalls Benjamin’s philosophical concept of the dialectic image in which the past and the present enter into a configuration that suddenly illuminates their relationship.
On October 15, a symposium took place in the Kunstraum München in which the participants in the project (these included, in addition to Michaela Melián and the exhibition curator Heike Ander, the philosopher and political scientist Michael Hirsch, the architect Nikolaus Hirsch, the archaeologist and historian Ronald Hirte, the radio-play dramaturge Barbara Schäfer and the journalist Jim G. Tobias) discussed the forgotten history of the Föhrenwald camp.
Translated by Timothy Jones