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| Shalechet - Photo F. Barilari |
Solo dopo aver girato un angolo molto stretto, ci si trova in uno di questi Vuoti, e questo è l'unico nel quale si può accedere.
Si è invitati a camminare in quel Vuoto, su quelle maschere, che sotto il peso dei passi producono quel suono di catene e si trasformano poco per volta in volti.
Difficile spiegare quanto faccia sentire pesante ogni passo che si fa. E' un'opera che va vissuta personalmente.
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| F. Barilari - The Axis of Continuity |
Si allungava progressivamente e in poco tempo è scomparsa, ma in quel breve lasso di tempo, questo dettaglio ha cambiato radicalmente la mia percezione di quello spazio.
Ho letto dopo, che fu solo a lavori iniziati che Libeskind pensò di aggiungere una piccolissima fenditura proprio in cima, sulla base del racconto di una persona che visse quella condizione.
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| Jewish Museum - Photo F. Barilari |
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| F. Barilari - The Jewish Museum in Berlin: Sketches |
Jewish Museum - Berlin
BETWEEN THE LINES _ Daniel Libeskind
"The
official name of the project is the 'Extension of the Berlin Museum with the
Jewish Museum Department," but I have called it 'Between the Lines.'
I call it
this because it is a project about two lines of thinking, organization and
relationship. One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments; the other
is a tortuous line, but continuing infinitely. These two lines develop
architecturally and programmatically through a limited but definite dialogue.
They also fall apart, become disengaged, and are seen as separated. In this
way, they expose a void that runs through this museum and through architecture,
a discontinuous void.
The site is the center of the old city of Berlin on Lindenstrasse near the famous baroque intersection of Wilhelmstraße, Friedrichstraße and Lindenstraße. At the same time, I felt that the physical trace of Berlin was not the only trace, but rather that there was an invisible matrix or anamnesis of connections in relationship. I found this connection between figures of Germans and Jews: between the particular history of Berlin, and between the Jewish history of Germany and of Berlin. I felt that certain people and particularly certain writers, scientists, composers, artists and poets formed the link between Jewish tradition and German culture. So I found this connection and I plotted an irrational matrix which was in the form of a system of squared triangles which would yield some reference to the emblematics of a compressed and distorted star: the yellow star that was so frequently worn on this very site. I looked for addresses of where these people lived or where they worked, for example someone like Rachel Varnhagen I connected to Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Paul Celan to someone like Mies van der Rohe and so on, and I was quite surprised that it was not so difficult to hear and plot the address that these people made: That they formed a particular urban and cultural constellation of Universal History. So that is one aspect of the project.
Another aspect was Arnold Schönberg. I was always interested in the music of Schönberg and in particular his period in Berlin. His greatest work is an opera called 'Moses and Aaron' which he could not complete. For some reason the logic of the text, which was the relationship between Moses and Aaron, between, one can say, the revealed and unimaginable truth and the spoken and mass-produced people's truth led to an impasse in which the music, the text written by Schönberg could not be completed. In the end, Moses doesn't sing, he just speaks "oh word, thou word" and one can understand it actually as a text as opposed to the norm of opera whose performance usually obliterates the text. When there is singing one cannot understand the words, but when there is no more singing, one can understand very well the missing word which is uttered by Moses, which is the call for the deed. So that was the second aspect.
I did a third thing. I was interested in the names of those people who were deported from Berlin during the fatal years, the Holocaust, that one knows only historically. I received from Bonn two very large volumes called 'Gedenkbuch' - they are incredibly impressive because all they contain are names, just names, dates of birth, dates of deportation and presumed places where these people were murdered. So I looked for the names of all the Berliners and where they had died - in Riga, in Lodz, in all the concentration camps. So this was the third aspect.
The 4th aspect of the project is formed by Walter Benjamin's One Way Street. This aspect is incorporated into the continuous sequence of 60 sections along the zig-zag, each of which represents one of the 'Stations of the Star' described in the text of Walter Benjamin's apocalypse of Berlin.
To summarize this four-fold structure: The first aspect is the invisible and irrationally connected star which shines with absent light of individual address. The second one is the cut of Act 2 of Moses and Aaron which has to do with the not-musical fulfillment of the word. The third aspect is that of the deported or missing Berliners, the 4th aspect is Walter Benjamin's urban apocalypse along the One Way Street.
The
building goes under the existing building, crisscrosses underground and materializes
itself independently on the outside. The existing building is tied to the
extension Underground, preserving the contradictory autonomy of both the old
building and the new building on the surface, while binding the two together in
depth, underground. Out of the terminus of history, which is nothing other than
the Holocaust with its concentrated space of annihilation and complete burn-out
of meaningful development of the city, and of humanity - out of this event
which shatters this place comes that which cannot really be given by
architecture.
The past fatality of the German Jewish cultural relation in Berlin is enacted now in the realm of the invisible. (It is this remoteness which I have tried to bring to consciousness.)
The work is conceived as a museum for all Berliners, for all Citizens. Not only those of the present, but those of the future and the past who should find their heritage and hope in this particular place, which is to transcend involvement and become participation.
With its special
emphasis on housing the Jewish Museum, it is an attempt to give a voice to a
common fate - to the contradictions of the ordered and disordered, the chosen
and not chosen, the vocal and silent.
Absence, therefore serves as a way of binding in depth, and in a totally different manner, the shared hopes of people. It is a conception which is absolutely opposed to reducing the museum or architecture to a detached memorial or to a memorable detachment. A conception, rather, which re-integrates Jewish/ Berlin History through the unhealable wound of faith, which in the words of Thomas Aquinus, is the "substance of things hoped for; proof of things invisible."
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| Daniel Libeskind _ Between the Lines, conceptual plan - 1989 |
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| F. Barilari - Jewish Museum |
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| F. Barilari - Jewish Museum |
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| F. Barilari - Jewish Museum |
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| F. Barilari - Jewish Museum |
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| F. Barilari - Jewish Museum |
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| F. Barilari - Jewish Museum |
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| F. Barilari - Jewish Museum |
