 City of Munich Title: Re/Place Project: A Permanent Site Specific Sculpture Installation Location: Max Weber Platz, Munich, Germany Materials: Bronze Dimensions: 25"X65"/63.5cmX165.1cm Sponsor: City of Munich Public Art Commission Date: 1998-2000 Back to Permanent Installations
At the terminus of the Maximilian Straße, one finds Max Weber Platz. At #9 exists a building untouched by the war. In an apartment in this building lived my new married parents Philip Sal & Ester Petrower. Survivors of their individual histories and horrors of the Second World War, they married and moved here to begin a family and a new life, with all that that entailed. A bronze cast slab, approximately the size of two large paving stones, on which marks have been scored in the original wax model. The marks produced in repeated alternating rows cover three quarters of the surface. The remainder is smooth, as if it has been wiped clean or more specifically eradicated. People walking to and from the shops, UBahn, and tram stop walk over and on the bronze perhaps noticing its difference form the other ground cover. In sighting the place at which a specific family (my own) re/started life and did so in the midst of the very population which had perpetuated the conditions of their experiences/sufferings, Re/Place presents history on a literal horizontal plane. Demonstrating our continual necessity to come to terms with history as an actual event, the work makes use of both the symbol of the hand made mark of the artist and the mark of time; past, present and future. |
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