New Zgody Square - Remodelling of the Bohaterow Getta Square

This project deals with the remodelling of a square as a memorial place in the centre of the Jewish ghetto during the years of the Nazi occupation in Cracow. After viewing archival films and photos and reading memoirs of those who survived the Holocaust, we have interpreted the history of the Cracow Ghetto as a sequence of moves. On the photos you can see loaded-down people carrying boxes and furniture, pulling large and smal carts. A column of young, perhaps teenage boys marches along the pavement, each of them carrying a stool over his head. A girl is going from the Pilsudski Bridge to the Podgorze district. She has in her hands a chair with its backrest down and inbetween the chair legs there is a bundle. In 1943, after the Nazis had liquidated the Ghetto, Zgody Square was full of useless things & a meaningful trace of the absence of their owners. As described by Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the chemist on Zgody Square, dilapidated innumerable wardrobes, tables, sideboards and other furniture had been abandoned; they had been moved from one place to another so much that no one knows how many times now. We have decided to tell the story of the place using the whole interior of the square. The remembrance of those who are no longer with us has been expressed by an accumulation of ordinary objects. Chairs, a well with a pump, rubbish bins, tram stop shelters, bicycle racks and even traffic signs, stripped of their everyday practical functions, have acquired a symbolical aspect. We have chosen patinated bronze; corroded cast-iron galvanised metal that becomes dull; paving blocks of grey syenite and ordinary concrete.