The Concept of Heavens

Hey. As promised, and as a follow-up of my grandfather's story, here goes the original concept of Heavens. In a next post, I'll talk about the realities that set in during and after my first journey to Oświęcim, Poland, to the Auschwitz concentration camps, and how it changed me.

The original concept

Heavens was conceived as a book+installation project, in which I personally try to make sense of the Holocaust during the second World War. I attempt to understand and show my feelings about and vision on the massive suffering that has happened... and hopefully, in what I create, I can in a tiny way help to never forget.

I intend to visit every known Nazi camp and sub camp (following the list published by the German Justice Department - Bundesministerium der Justiz - in 1967) and make an image of the blue sky exactly above each location. A blue sky, as in 'that heaven above', and nothing else. A clear view on each heaven, sober and blue, yet burdened with holding the memory of the ones who suffered below.

Standing on the very same places as the victims, and looking up at the very same sky that they must have seen, it is my belief that their souls went to that heaven in that place. And for that reason, I feel those pieces of heaven should belong to them. With this work, I wish to touch the concept of heaven and how it can exist, knowing that something clamant as the Holocaust has happened.

At the same time, as a viewer, you can never really know if I actually went to these locations, because there's nothing physical in the images to prove that they were made in those places. Only via a reference number connected to each image, and a separate list, you can find the location of that image. This in reference to the difficulty - still now - of historians reconstructing the lists of people who died, and where.

The truth of these images lies in part in the faith the viewer must have in who I am, that he/she knows I actually have done this. Just, and only because I say I did. That truth is my word that this happened, yet at the same time is no direct physical proof... again a parallel with history, as so many camps were destroyed to cover up their existence.

Because what am I, if I don't have my word?

The list contains 1634 camps, located all over Europe (look here for an example of a map to sense the magnitude), the overwhelming majority of which have been destroyed and don't exist anymore. I will attempt to document each heaven and publish a book with 1634 pages and 1634 blue images. An edition of 1634 copies. 1634 heavens.

This book, containing only blue skies and a reference list, will appear too senseless, too abstract and too large and too heavy and too much to hold and comprehend... But that's exactly my point: The Holocaust is too much to hold, istoo much to comprehend.

It is too much.

I want to make this book because I've always wished there existed already such a book, because I've always wanted to buy such a book and give it a place between all the other books in my room, as a reminder, to carry it along with me in my life, as a weight that we maybe, maybe, all should be carrying on our shoulders.

Time to think

I know the research will be immense to locate every location exactly (it already was when I tested going to all 48 camps linked to Auschwitz), and setting myself the maybe too narrow sliver that the sky has to be blue is not making my life any easier either.... And the installation that will surround the book, well... that is even another story.

And the part of how on earth to fund this project, which will be massively expensive, and can I justify this cost in the name of an art installation? Would that money not be better spent elsewhere?

What are your thoughts? I realize that I am blowing a conceptual bubble that is very very thin... reducing an incredibly massive and the "heaviest" of topics to its barest minimum and hopefully its essence... but I'm doing it purposely, as it is my vision on this.... and at the same time I can't help but thinking: isn't reducing to the maximum actually the only possible way? And isn't the only goal that I have - being that I contribute in some way to the continuing awareness and prevention of  the Holocaust from being forgotten by looking at it in a way that (I hope) is different - justification enough to go for it?

Heavens - book cover - CONCEPT