the break between memory and history

The monument no longer exists. What is left is sad remains stuck in the ground, overgrown by weeds during summer. A small mound of an artificially formed hill suggests that many years ago a national monument stood here – the destination of thousands of people visiting the site. Today, it is difficult to believe in it, sight-seeing a field of weeds. Past intensity, thickness and monumentalism of this site, now only known from historical photographs and post-cards, today exhales only void, nothingness, erasure and oblivion. Standing in an empty place of the former mausoleum, one can easily find a certain state of helplessness and sadness against what once was and now disappeared, a mercilessly revoked past, its escape, forgetfulness.
This helplessness also accompanies our collecting of reminiscences – these scraps of memory which was broken, missing.

The monument no longer exists. Its feeble traces can only be found through other sculpted objects and architectural forms – in migrating, dispersed fragments. Thus, lost memory-history opens a new field for the operation or archive-biased memory which is not a deliberate record of once experienced memory but is a pre-planned and organised reassembling of scraps of lost memory. In such a case, the archive will become an attempt at the materialisation of this memory.