Places of Remembrance: On Urban Aesthetics and Experiential Memories

The following text aims to address the relationship between art and public space focusing on the memorial strategies that unfold in it and the relationship they have with the aesthetic, perceptual-sensorial sphere, through the urban dimension. Beginning by noting the various tendencies to subject forgetting and memory to a kind of neutralizing naturalization or reinclusion, the following text will discuss, first, a number of forms of remembrance that insist on nonlinearity, latency, and that take place in whole or in part below the level of consciousness (§ 2). The discourse will then move on to examine the intertwining of theoretical problems and realizations of memorial paths based on innovative experiential forms (§ 3). And to analyze some specific cases in which the memorial process in public space, particularly in the Berlin context, is put at the center, comparing the results, as in the case of Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Stih and Schnok’s Places of Remembrance (§§ 4–6). To conclude with a review of the acquisitions that this trajectory has made possible (§7).