The
ReCollection Mechanism is a thrilling multimedia installation,
hosted in the space below the temple where, similar to an
ossuary, we find the intertwining branch-like lead pipes of
the original plumbing system. A wire mesh suspended in a completely
dark space forms a huge, constantly winding scroll. . The
texts from Who’s Who projected on it seem to
hang magically in space.
Moreover, members of the public use two computers to search
for specific names and words in the database, which are read
out once found. This is a work of great visual and emotive
impact. “Document” becomes “monument”,
but immaterial, dynamic and constantly changing, a void animated
by texts and voices.
Its history is as follows. Browsing in a second-hand bookstore
in Istanbul in 1985, Arnold Dreyblatt came across a copy of
Who’s Who in Central & East Europe 1933,
a biographical dictionary with 10,000 entries for ecclesiastics,
diplomats, civil servants, technicians, educators, military
personnel, industrialists, journalists, painters, sculptors
and writers of various origins, from Albania to Estonia, from
Turkey to Finland and Greece, from Austria to Lithuania and
Danzig. Published in Zurich in 1934, it speaks of a world
that has practically disappeared. This imposing “Book
of Memory” has been an obsession with Dreyblatt ever
since. He selected 765 of the 10,000 entries, concentrating
on forgotten or “no longer famous” figures, to
construct a “hypertext”, a sort of “guided
tour in an architecture of biographical information”.
“My aim was not to rewrite history but to reinvent it
in the sense of revitalizing it through the active participation
of the user and the public,” i.e. not to confine memory
to the past but to project it into the present. He thus drew
up a new Who’s Who, in alphabetical order like
the original but also thematically arranged. This was to form
the fulcrum of all his subsequent works, combined with other
material to create a sort of “archive of archives”
in progress that has come in the space of seven years to comprise
over 500 pages of text and photographs. All of Dreyblatt’s
installations are interactive. They are based on texts, but
texts that abandon the unequivocal status of the page and
become real or virtual architectural structures to be accessed
via computer or projected on screens at environmental scale.
As he explains, “Memory is not only a question of time
but also of space for memories and archives. The texts are
also images, objects, information.” |
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