Slaughterhouse 5 - O'Brien's story telling wall in Dresden as homage to Kurt Vonnegut.
Rebuilt after the flooding in 2013.
Irish artist Ruairi O'Brien created a memorial wall in the Dresden
cellar where Kurt Vonnegut survived the 1945 bombings (Photo: Valentina
Pop)
The wall installation I built for Kurt Vonnegut tells the story of the destruction and rebuilding of the city of Dresden destroyed in the last days of the Second World War 1945.
It is a plan that depicts the city of Dresden as a macromuseum.
Kurt Vonnegut spent the night of the bombing as a prisoner of war in the cellar where the "storytelling wall" has been installed. This authentic space is now the cloakroom of the trade fair buildings of Dresden. It is also next door to the city marketing offices.
The old map of the city of Dresden before the war and the new map of the city as we find it today are layered on top of each other which demonstrates powerfully the loss and the re-invention of space. Illustrations I did depict scenes or persons out of the book. Quotations from Vonnegut can be found in the city plan and I have included quotations that I found appropriate from Erich Kästner and Viktor Klemperer, both famous writers from Dresden who also wrote about the city and the tragic times. In this way, architecture and text become one. I have also drawn a map depicting other important sites that I want to connect with each other, which creates a type of macromuseum guide to the city. This includes the micromuseum’s I created for the famous German writer Erich kästner and the industrial concrete panel factory (Plattenbaumuseum or Betonzeitschiene), which played such an important role in the rebuilding of the destroyed city.
On the place where the famous Frauenkirche has been rebuilt I have placed the quote from Billy Pilgrim, the soldier narrator in Vonnegut's book who describes the city of Dresden after the destruction with the sentence, "It was like the moon". A further drawing depicts the key moment of the infamous book burning in Dresden on March 8, 1933, earlier as the burning of books in Berlin. The geometrical destruction of the city is depicted by the triangle used to coordinate the bombers on the night of the destruction. The military museum of Dresden is connected the point were the first bomb was dropped. A point depicts the burial place of Casper David Friedrich whom I also quote and connect to Vonnegut’s Tralfamadore.
With this work, I am compacting and interlaying history and information, tragic moments with reflection in visual beauty to tell a memorable story. Memory becomes a creative personal journey were the viewer is animated to travel in time to pick up the facts that are required to get close to the truth.
It is planned to extend the work online with a website.
http://euobserver.com/social/123134
