Melting Traces
Melting Traces was conceived for the European research project and competition REcall: European Conflict Archaeological Landscape Reappropriation. A ten-block mock-up of the proposal was later presented in the exhibition Beyond Memorialisation at the Nordic Embassies in Berlin.
The project proposed a temporary public installation for Rome's Quadraro district, where, on 17 April 1944, more than one thousand men were deported to forced labour camps in Germany during the Nazi roundup known as the Rastrellamento del Quadraro. The intervention envisioned one thousand transparent ice blocks distributed throughout the neighbourhood, each containing an everyday object embedded within the ice.
For the Berlin presentation, ten ice blocks containing objects acquired from flea markets demonstrated the proposal. In its intended realization, the installation would expand to one thousand blocks, with the objects collected through exchanges with local residents, allowing familiar belongings to reappear unexpectedly within the streets where the deportations had taken place.
Over the course of two or thirty two hours, the ice would gradually melt, exposing the objects before disappearing completely. Unfolding within the everyday life of the neighbourhood, the installation allowed memory to emerge through the slow transformation of the material rather than through the permanence of a monument.
