Christoph Mayer’s The Invisible Camp – Audio Walk Gusen (2007) leads users through three market towns in Upper Austria which during World War II were the sites of concentration camps. Mayer’s artistic sound collage succeeds to visualize a long supressed past in an individual listener’s mind, and establishes an intimate and reflective form of commemoration which leads to critical questioning of neglected or institutionalized practices of commemoration. My talk reflects on how Mayer succeeds to bridge the distance to this past and makes it relevant for us today, and explains in which way his artistic practice can act as a guideline for the creation of other memory works elsewhere – especially in places where most traces of the past were erased and where everyday life goes hand in hand with a will to remember a painful past which happened right there.
The event is going to be filmed and will be uploaded to our YouTube channel shortly after.
ZOOM: https://kuei.zoom.us/j/8535747861
Location: INS002