At the intersection of Lustdorf Road and Arteleriyska Street, in Odesa, there is a “green spot”, mapped as Artelerisky Park. Very little is known about this place, for passersby the park is just a shorter way and they speed up while walking through it. A large building in stone with no signs on it is hanging over the silent path. It’s hard to guess form the first glance, what is this place and what is its purpose, as if it exists outside of time. The place was repurposed three times throughout its140-year history. At first it was The Second Jewish Cemetery, then it became a memorial of execution of French international soldiers in 1919, today it’s an abandoned planted area, where homeless live, and people walk their dogs between big gray rocks that look like gravestones hiding behind the trees.
The history of this place is an emblematic case of collective forgetting, when the traumatic events are concealed or uncomfortable for public discussion, therefore they cannot be comprehended. The memory of the place is being washed away from the map of the city, as the function of the space is being eroded. The symbolic meaning for the community related to this space is being lost and replaced by marginalized practices. It makes the place unprotected, leaving it waiting for new changes anxiously, that may erase its past irreversibly, and people will continue walking over the memory mindlessly.
By Memory is a creative and research practice of reconstruction of different layers of memory. It aims to bring back the lost location to the city and to comprehend the traumatic history behind this place. During one month, a group of researchers and artists were gathering information about this place, in particular oral stories, documenting both its historical context and current condition. As a result, they have created three maps demonstrating condition of the place in different time periods and objects that interact with the space, reflecting on it.
Two objects refer to the past of the place through interaction with the former memorial — it is a replica of the New Jewish Cemetery gate. The artists installed metal gate at the facade of the memorial. The gate symbolically reminds us of the initial function of the space, however, unlike a real gate, this gate is impossible to walk through.
A memorial plate was placed at the other side of the memorial. It refers to the other part of the history of this building — memorial of French soldiers, ruined during the decommunization. The group of artists found fragments of the original plate and reconstructed it. Cracks and gaps of the missing parts form an ornament, that appears as a testimony of the processes that had occurred to the object and makes us reflect on the fragile and unprotected nature of the past.