A discussion evening about interventions into public space and about the Memorial of Silence’s dialogue with Prague’s largest brownfield, which is now coming to an end.
In the spring of 2023, extensive renovation works will begin on the train tracks at and around Bubny-Zátory station. The Memorial of Silence, too, will begin its renovation project, and so this unwelcoming place, sometimes called a scar on the face of Prague, will become a thing of the past. In this relation, we recently presented the work of Richard Homola, who spent the past several years recording the area surrounding Bubny station in a new series of photographic images.
The unveiling of a sculpture by French artist Dominique Defontaines was the most recent event of our gallery of ephemeral sculptures created four years ago for the Memorial of Silence by Ivana Brádková. The works of art were gradually swallowed up by their surroundings, and in the next three years the station will become a sculpture in architecture itself.
“We are trying to accelerate discussion of what a place of memory actually is and what memory means in relation to designing urban spaces. Over the past few years, we have engaged in creative dialogue with urban planners, and our architects have presented several alternatives for organizing public space in relation to our plans, which we shall begin realizing next spring.
We have called our experiments into the place as it looks today ‘interventions into a brownfield,’ for even this ash heap of history is to a certain degree a public space. Photographers associated with the Memorial of Silence have created entire series of images that, already at the moment of their creation, captured incomprehensible scenes from the central city that next year will become archival material,” says Pavel Štingl, director of the Memorial of Silence.
