Staged by Studio Azzurro from an idea of the students of the Memory Journeys

We are coming closer to the centenary of the Great Crisis of 1929, of the Germaan laws about eugenic spaying (1933), and of the Italian Racial Laws (1938). After about four generations, direct transmission of these experiences will not be possible anymore; at the same time, familiar political attitudes, misinterpreted or deliberately manipulated disorders, and a widespread desire for authority as a replacement for absent teaching arise all around us.

This exhibition stems from the passionate intentions of a group of young students and offers a contemporary glance on the vision and listening of archival footage and of the testimonies from Auschwitz’ witnesses. We chose to tell these stories through fragments, distances and persistences that shall lie close to the complex layering system of memory. This language tries to involve the entirety of the visitor’s body in an experience that compels him or her to act personally, to face something that seems to lack complete explanation.

The path is divided into five moments: the soundscape of the train car, the ‘square of witnesses’ (featuring texts and the young “witnesses’ witnesses”), the Camps as “workshop”, the language of the Camps, the coming back of identity through the other’s gaze.