Tag: Daniel Libeskind

Absence (10mm II)

Hisham Matar’s autobiographic book The Return talks about his father’s absence.

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The image above show the Voided Void at the end of the Axis of Holocaust in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. 

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Matar quotes Aristoteles: The theory that the void exists involves the existence of place: for one would define void as place bereft of body.

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Right now, the museum is being prepared for a new standard exhibition, and hence almost completely void.

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Matar continues to reflect about Aristoteles. He adds: He says nothing of time here, and time is surely part of it all, of how we try to accommodate the absence. […]. Only time can hope to fill the void. The body of my father is gone, but his place is here and occupied by something that cannot just be called memory.

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A second accessible void in the Libeskind building is the Memory Void, containing Menashe Kadishman’s installation Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves).

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Matar concludes this reflection: What is extraordinary is that, given everything that has happened, the natural alignment of the heart remains towards the light.

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The Jewish Museum (Summer in Berlin I)

Berlin has changed a lot since the wall came down in 1989. Most notably the constricted architecture from before finds its counterpoint in buildings that show a liberated sense of what can be done with space.

One of my favorites is the Libeskind addition to the Jewish Museum from 2001.

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You can only enter it underground and are confronted immediately with long and slanted corridors.

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I felt the natural way to photograph this is by slanting the camera as well. There is a lot of narrow vertical space,

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admitting just enough light so that we don’t feel claustrophobic.

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Then there are the Voids, most of them inaccessible, but present through views and gaps in our perception.

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We lose the distinction of being inside or outside, but we learn that is us who create the space around us.