Tag: Participation

Hadas Tapouchi’s photographs show the everyday cityscape, the ordinary places where people live, work, go to school, and spend their leisure time. It is only the addition of information about the historical context that makes the history of these places palpable and alters our view of them as we discover that these are the very places where forced laborers were housed in Nazi Germany.

Tapouchi’s photographs map historic places in order to investigate how they have become normalized in the contemporary city. Her images bridge the historical distance and thus mediate between between past and present. Especially during World War II, forced laborers were a ubiquitous sight on the streets of Munich. They could be seen on their daily journey to work or at laboring in public space, for example building roads or working for the city. In order to be allocated forced laborers, an enterprise not only had to register its workforce requirement but also provide housing for the workers. For this reason, large companies erected their own camps. Public bodies, such as the City of Munich, provided mass accommodation and rented housing space to smaller companies.

Tapouchi is interested in the potential of collective remembrance to resist the marginalization and invisibility of history in public space. Through what she calls “memory practice” she explores the urban planning of the past and the power relationships it expressed and examines how the memory of the violent history of forced labor has been overwritten by gentrification and value creation. Her project brings history perceptibly and physically closer to those who remember today.