28.12.2007
The Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum
This project involves the transformation of an Industrial Building into a Holocaust Museum and Education Center. As a storytelling Museum, this Museum 'both in design and exhibition' is driven by the story of the Holocaust within the contextualized narrative of the pre-War reality and integrated into the ethos of contemporary society.
It is on the basis of the story that artifacts, photographs, diverse media such as film, video, narrative tale, text, are be selected. The roject entails the creation of spaces in which to encounter this tragic story and its unrepresentable horror an uncanny memory around which we should never feel comfortable. As no single mode of representation can encompass the Holocaust story, our approach to design hopes to suggest the value of the coexistence, interplay and integration of various modes of re-presentation. The project encompasses Historical narratives, Testimonies, and Archival Modes. Narratives and storytelling mediated by the voice of the Historian. Objects in the Archives, removed from their contexts, rendered part of a new system: A collection after the Holocaust. Testimonies not only portray first hand, but as a transactive process and dialogic relationship between testifier and listener, in which the voice and subjectivity of the individual are reestablished, they may bridge a gap in time reintegrating the witness in the present.
This project was developed by Julian Bonder + Associates in Partnership with Michael Berenbaum (Project Director – US Holocaust Museum, Washington DC and former CEO of the Shoah Foundation, Los Angeles).