Background
Mr. Trampusch knows Horror, the smell of Horror.
We have seen pictures about Horror; we have seen films, read books about
it. Everybody knows about the Horror of the concentration camps we would
like to say.
Nevertheless there are forces in today’s society denying the existence of
Horror. We hear the same rhetoric’s shaking up to life the same racism,
same anti-Semitism, same xenophobic intolerance.
The feebleness of memory.
Walking around Aflenz we saw nothing but a bucolic Austrian postcard
landscape. Where once a mass grave, fragile wild flowers trembling with the
wind; Himmelschlüssel, Schneeglöckchen, Hänsel & Gretel, tall trees as
witnesses.
Meanwhile, in the yard of the town’s tavern, hoist in a flag-poll and as a
sticker in some cars, the flag of USA’s Southern States.
While eating in Graz coffee houses we ask our table’s neighbours what did
they knew about the Aflenz concentration camp. None. Never heard about
it.
In our collective memory the Nazi concentration camps are directly – and
almost exclusively - linked with the Holocaust.
Looking at Mauthausen prisoner’s population we get to know that the
concentration of Jewish people was at most the 10% of the total inmates.
Who were the remaining 90%?
We looked at it: Anyone, whoever. The motives for imprisonment were
many, intricated many. Large amount of people have being kidnapped
because the Nazis needed cheap labour forces for their factories, simple as
that.
Anybody for any reason could end hers/his life in a concentration camp.
In their obsession for bureaucratic order, the Nazis developed a badge
coding system for an easy overlook of the prisoners cause and status, in
order to decide the level of torture to submit them; a long range in sadism,
being the Jewish people always the worst out.
That badge coding system was an analogue copy of the well established
traffic signs scheme; in the traffic the signs are accepted by everybody as
an organization for security in every day’s life, something meant to protect
the people.
Now again the Nazis invert the symbols.
Wild flowers and traffic signs.
Idea / Implementation
There is no doubt that reinforcement on the memory of the concentration
camp in Aflenz is very necessary, both in Aflenz and Graz.
The Neo-Nazi argumentations focus now their xenophobic hatred “only”
against what they call the alien bodies in society. We think it is very
important to meet that simplifying and confusing manoeuvre by pointing out
that in such ideology everybody is a potential target, a potential alien in their
hunger for power.
The Nazi regime violated and victimized all levels of society. No one was
safe.
No one will be safe if we allow those forces to repeat same hate.
Looking at it we become aware that in the badge coding system there
is one or more badges that suit each one of us and most likely
everyone we know. We guess all citizens will find out the same, their
own badge.
In order to regain the Nazi transvestism of the traffic signs and close the
circle of symbols, we want to create a new generation of traffic signs
containing, in the same street language, the concentration camps code.
The aim of this action is to, unexpected, confront the by passers with a sign
that it’s pointing out his/hers possible identity and categorisation in a
concentration camp, or a friend’s or a member of his/hers family, which
would indicate that person could have been transferred to a concentration
camp.
In Aflenz the population of the town was kidnapped and forced to witness, in
complete silence, the Horror created by the Nazi machinery.
As the wild flowers, born in the very same place and just as innocent, they
were forced to suffer the nightmare life has become. Just like the flowers
they could be trampled at any moment for any reason. Their life became as
fragile as the flowers.
To be re-named, re-titled could mean dead.
In traffic’s sign a flower, below another traffic sign with the classification in
the camp.
The flowers as witness and a symbolic reminder of those who died 1943-45.
Several times, in our artistic projects, we met survivors of similar violations,
torture and denigrations, they all say the same: SILENCE is the worst,
silence as if it never did happen to me. Talk about it!
Any discussion provoked by this work is most welcome and highly
necessary.
Ingrid Falk & Gustavo Aguerre
Drottningg. 71 A - 111 36 Stockholm - Sweden
+46 8 796 9292 - +46 704 617380
[email protected]
[email protected]
www.fa-art.pp.se