ARTEINMEMORIA: Presenza e oblio della Shoah fra le rovine della sinagoga di Ostia Antica

In 2002, drawing inspiration from the Synagogue Stommeln Art Project inaugurated in 1990, Adachiara Zevi, historian of art and art curator, started the project Arteinmemoria, (http://www.arteinmemoria.it/home.htm), probably the only ongoing contemporary art project in Italy devoted to the memory of the Holocaust — a memory that is non-ritualistic, in constant evolution, and continuously mirroring the oblivion that is at the same time its opposite and its premise. In 2017 Arteinmemoria reached its ninth edition and hosted 45 artists, from Sol LeWitt (2002) to Ariel Schlesinger (2017). The absolute contemporaneity of the project (all the works are ideated expressly for the event) is located in the most ancient Jewish space in Europe: the synagogue in Ostia Antica, the oldest temple in the West, to whose architecture – such as in Stommeln – the artists are required to refer. Here we can identify an Italian peculiarity of the project, but in this case the immanent presence of classical ruins do not limit the possibilities for artistic elaborations, but provide new solutions and potentialities. In my talk, I will describe the objectives nominated by Zevi (who is also the responsible in Italy for Gunter Denmig’s Stolpersteine), and I will focus on the invited German artists (in chronological order: Rudolf Herz, Edward Winklhofer, Jochen Gerz, Stih&Schnock, Horst Hoheisel). It is actually in Germany, the land of the perpetrators, that perhaps contemporary art has found the more convincing and more exact forms to represent the irrepresentable past of the extermination: with Jochen Gerz’s and Horst Hoheisel’s “anti-monuments”, Stih&Schnock’s “mobile memorials”, Rudolph Herz’s unreachable towers.