Holocaust Recollections, Lior Israel

Holocaust Recollections - Commemorative Architectural Representation of the Holocaust in Israel

Project Description

The current phase of the project begins with the death of my grandmother in 2018, and our family's loss of the last remaining person to carry any sort of personal, rather than collective, memories from the time-period of the Holocaust.

My thesis claims that within the Israeli society, where Holocaust commemoration is ever so present, its public representation has always been linked to, and effected by, the living-personal-memory and testimony of the victims.

These days, however, we are facing the unfortunate end of an era with the loss of the very last Holocaust survivors and so, our memory of this time-period relies solely on top-down narrated collective memory and the formally-formed written and spoken ethos of this major historical event, rather than being also greatly effected by organic, bottom-up personal memory. My belief is that within the Israeli society, this heavy-weight swift in memory balance from the "possibly-personal" to the "inevitably-collective" should contextualize a new discourse in the field of Holocaust commemoration and how it is remembered and presented in the public sphere.

My project takes place in Independence park in Tel Aviv, Israel, at the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. The site currently has an ad-hoc planned path connecting the cliff promenade and the beach promenade. My intention is to plan a Holocaust commemorative site in Israel which incorporates a "mundane" function - id est a connecting stairwell - into the "near-holy" commemorative monument, and challenge the concept of what-and-how remembering the Holocaust in Israel may become. The idea is to open discourse and try to allow a wider sheet of representation for different memories, personal ones, which would in turn enhance and fill-in the missing pieces that the often told collective ethos cannot provide.

Before final planning of the project, I first aim to built  a wide-scale try-and-error sandpit of conceptual and spatial ideas which would in turn eventually develop into the concretisation of the monument.