Author: hamish stewart

Stolpersteine update

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Stolpersteine, Ursulinengasse 7 Dusseldorf - Altstadt; Karl Jung

The Düsseldorf Stolpersteine series has grown to encompass Stolpersteine from 24 locations across the city.

Our journey takes us from the ancient town centre – the Altstadt, across the Rhine to the upmarket Oberkassel and then southeast to the old working class district of Eller.

As we stumble across the ‘stones’ we can see that some have been in place for several years – becoming part of the pavement with their softened corners and the marks of the revolving cycles of the seasons. With the more recent ‘stones’ one can still see the evidence of the hand of Gunter Demnig in the disturbed pavement and the new clear brass.

A map of Stolpersteine locations can be found here →

Stolpersteine series added

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Kirschfeldstrasse 145 Dusseldorf; Henriette Lion

Kirschfeldstrasse 145 Dusseldorf; Henriette Lion

The Düsseldorf Stolpersteine series has now been added to the site, a walk which follows the locations of Stolpersteine in a variety of districts in the city.

I first discovered Stolpersteine (stumble stones) in Berlin in the summer of 2006. Further research revealed that the Stolpersteine project is the work of a single German artist – Gunter Demnig and that today more than 13,000 Stopersteine are embedded in streets all over Germany and a growing number of European cities.

As I have walked around Düsseldorf, a trajectory dictated by maps of existing locations, I have discovered the organic nature of the project – literally ‘stumbling’ across recently installed ‘stones’ or directed to other locations by local residents.

London Series – Clerkenwell and Smithfield – Crime, revolutions and executions

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Crime, revolutions and executions seems an apt subtitle for Clerkenwell and Smithfield – a district that has housed prisons, acted as a site for public executions and has been the chosen residence of its fair share of revolutionaries over the centuries.

Clerkenwell (Clerks Well) and Smithfield (Smooth field) are two ancient districts on the boundaries of the City of London and over the centuries have seen multiple waves of development – from fashionable districts in the 17th century, through industrial revolution and post-war decline to come full circle to trendy districts in the 1990s. An example is the Clerkenwell house of detention – first a prison, later a school and now – luxury flats (though the prison cells remain in the basement).

Walking around the streets here you try to imagine the hemmed in feeling of the ‘Rookeries’ – the narrow streets and cheap houses that covered the modern day area from New Oxford street to Farrington Road. Many of the locations in the area feature in the writing of Dickens including; Saffron Hill, Bleeding Heart Yard and Clerkenwell Green, an odd name as it has not been ‘green’ for 300 years. This old village square of Clerkenwell has links with radical politics with the Bolshevik’s newspaper Iskra published here in the early years of the 20th century. The same building now houses the Marx Memorial Library. There is a local story that Lenin met the young Stalin in the Crown Tavern on the green in 1903.

Clerkenwell has a monastic tradition as well, acting as the home of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem – today only the southern gatehouse of their Priory exists but a link with the monastic order remains in the name of the district’s oldest pub – the Jerusalem Tavern, which has existed since the 14th century.
Smithfield, a popular site for the public execution of heretics and dissidents was until the 1850s open fields and the location of London’s meat market. Cattle were driven down to Smithfield via St John’s Street and slaughtered and sold on site. The area was also the location of two monasteries, Charterhouse – later an almshouse and St Bartholomew the Great.

Memories of the Displaced

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The genesis of this project arose out of my first visits to Poland in 2005 and the stark differences I discovered between the Polish Catholic cemeteries and the state of the Jewish cemeteries in Krakow. It was not just the overgrown, cracked and broken tombstones – but also the years of death on many of the tombstones in the Miodowa Street cemetery. Then there is the absence of the detritus of visits by family members to the graves – clearly evident in other Polish cemeteries. It is this last visual clue that reminds us that in less than six years a rich and varied Jewish culture, which had existed for 600 years, was eradicated.

The statistics of those who were displaced seem beyond imagination – yet they involve countless individual lives and histories. The ‘Stolpersteine’ (Stumble Stones) project by the German artist Günter Demnig, is just one small step to assimilate this enormity into individual personal details. ‘Stumble Stones’ are small brass plaques lodged in the pavement next to the homes of those deported. Each plaque indicates the name, year of birth, date of deportation, and eventual destination of each individual. Sometimes whole clusters of these stones can be found where entire apartment blocks were evacuated of their inhabitants.

In the Polish city of Bydgoszcz at Fordon a memorial marks the site of the Dolina Śmierci (valley of death) where 5,000 – 6,000 local residents were murdered in 1939. The panels on the memorial, which list just name and profession, reflect the lists compiled before the war, which sought to eradicate the doctors, lawyers and priests of a generation.

These physical memories remind us that within the grand historical narrative lie the stories of ordinary people and everyday lives.

The burnt our shell of St Johannes church in Gdansk and the half-finished Sagrada de Familia in Barcelona are both reminders of the interruptions and dislocation of war and the distortions of fascism which has left its mark in cemeteries, cities and pavements across Europe.

Les Murs de Paris

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Walking through Paris from the fashionable 8ème to the rapidly gentrifying old working class districts to the North & North East brings you across a variety of signs and street art on the walls – official & unofficial. This journey takes in the work of contemporary urban artists, Mosko et Associés, monuments and memorials to the city’s history, and the work of architects, builders and artisans who have left their stamp on the fabric of Paris.

This series, collected over several years, also reflects the impermanence of the urban space – murals can be repainted, buildings torn down, districts regenerated and urban improvements created.

One example is the ongoing renovation of Paris’ metro stations, where the plastic cladding walls from the 1970s are being stripped away – to reveal the original tiles and advertising hoarding from the beginning of the 20th century. These ‘improvements’ however can also eradicate more recent history – such as the murals at Abbesses metro now painted over in featureless white, returning the station to its ‘original’ condition. On a recent trip to Paris I also discovered that the prowling tigers in the Villa de L’Ermitage had disappeared – replaced by a uniform covering of gray paint.

Brussels New Year 2007

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A random walk through Brussels in the closing days of 2007. The journey takes in the districts of Ixelles & St Gilles in the south with their combination of Art Deco, Art Nouveau and other architectural styles. A fine example of Art Nouveau is the house built for the industrialist Edouard Hannon with its frescos by Boudouin, which today houses the Espace Photographique Contretype.

Walking along the Avenue Louise and the streets surrounding it reveals the grand houses of Brussels. At the end of Avenue Louise lies the Abbye de la Cambre, the 12th century Benedictine Abby which formed the origins of the village of Ixelles long before it became part of Brussels with the construction of Avenue Louise in the 1840s.

Our walk continues to the centre of Brussels and the Christmas market in Place Ste Catherine and beyond to the Grand Place.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

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The 18th century parkland of Bretton Hall is, like any urban space, a man-made landscape – modeled and transformed to suit the tastes of it’s owner. Today as the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the grounds of the estate provide an environment for the exhibition of contemporary sculpture. A recent addition is work by Andy Goldsworthy – a permanent exhibition of ‘Hanging Trees’, embedded in the remains of a derelict Ha-Ha – part of the original fabric of the Bretton estate.

This juxtaposition of the remnants of the original estate, and its artificial landscape, combined with the free-standing work in the grounds, creates a compelling dialogue on the shifting and changing use of the land and its transformation over time and ownership.

Fragments of Roman Arles

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The collection of artifacts in the city museum of Arles is to trace a journey through a changing spiritual and social landscape from the 1st to the 4th Century.

This was the time of Arles pre-eminence as a Greco-Roman city, a period richly described in Lawrence Durrell’s last book, ‘Caesar’s vast ghost’ – a part travelogue, part personal reminisce. His description of the once grand funerary monuments of the Alyscamps in Arles – the best of which now lie in the city museum – is to see in marble & stone the transition from the polytheism of the Roman world to the emergence of the Christian and monotheistic age.