The Italian Memorial at Auschwitz

The authors’ concept for the installation was of a path through memories made up of a spiral tunnel on which were mounted twenty-three canvas paintings, running along a walkway recalling the sleepers of the railway line to the camp, accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Luigi Nono. The operational part of the project started with a photographic documentation campaign and a laser scan map so that this unique installation would be able to be remounted at EX3, a former auditorium in Florence which is being converted into a museum covering the deportation of Italians to the Nazi extermination camps.

The project was very challenging. In the first place, the Auschwitz Memorial has very tight rules governing access and movement, and it was extremely cold. Further, the entire process of maneuvering the delicate paintings onto large rollers was fraught with difficulty: each painting was irregular in form and had been deformed over the years, and rolling them for transport ran the risk of causing further damage both to canvases and the paint. It was particularly difficult to develop an suitable system of protection for the paint layer due to the fragile technique used by the artists, and also to devise an appropriate and accurate cataloguing system so that each canvas could be correctly remounted in the future.