"MNEMOSPHERE is a research project born within Politecnico di Milano (Italy), that aims to investigate the different ways in which the identity and memory of places can be designed and communicated through atmospheric spaces capable of stimulating emotions.
By bringing together the skills and tools offered by the culture of design and paying attention to both new languages and new technologies, the research aims to contribute to the understanding of the links between memory, exhibition spaces and emotions by creating tools and guidelines that could support the design of spaces that go beyond the traditional concept of memorial sites.
Mnemosphere therefore bases its approach on a synergistic collaboration between different disciplinary fields. The driving force of the research is the dialogue between the design of communication for the territory and the design of installations in the atmospheric dimension. The interdisciplinary nature of the research is then enriched with the study and analysis of emotions, colour perception, and the design of temporary spaces and services.
This research does not aim to give a single definition to the concept of “mnemosphere”, but intends to start from the intangibility of its substance and the plurality of voices it contains, in order to visualize and communicate it."
text from https://www.mnemosphere.polimi.it/
"MICRO-MEMO Lab" was my first „micro-memory laboratory”, set up in the Tower of the former Battery Factory in Timisoara/ Romania. It combines my yearlong interest on memory and reconstruction of the past with my passion for microscopy that I discovered as a student at the veterinary medicine faculty. Micro-Memo Lab presents the stages of discovery, reconstruction and interpretation of the „micro-history” of this building which was erected at the beginning of the 20th century. I collected pieces of masonry, wood splinters, dust, cobwebs, feathers, rust and paint from the space before it was sanitized, combined them with different liquid media, reagents and pigments and then inspected them under the microscope. Suddenly, a completely new world was revealed to me, where the micro-universe of the past met the present macro-universe.
The installation in the Tower of the former Battery Factory became in the following years the pilot project of an extensive process of “mapping” and microscopic interpretation of the memory of certain buildings, spaces and historic routes.
The “MICRO-MEMO PetriLab” installation is part of my “MICRO-MEMO LAB” series, in situ installations that reconstruct, through archive photographs and microscopic analysis of samples taken from that particular space, a world often forgotten and impossible to be observed with the naked eye. The memory laboratory that I installed in the now closed coal mine in Petrila/ Romania presents details from old photos, "reactivated" in Petri dishes, a photo of the first music band of the coalmine, a photo of the miners waiting for an important visit in 1944, but also a microscopic view of the “dissolving” process when coal was put in contact with industrial solvent. The rapid, seemingly random movements of the coal fragments illustrate the decomposition of that world and of those times, in which the fragility of the human being is accompanied by the fragility of materiality. An invitation to reflect on the imprint that man leaves in a space but also on the way in which a certain space marks, to a greater or lesser extent, the life of a person.
The theme of the coal mine is inextricably linked to my family's history. In January 1945, 68.000 Romanians of German origin were loaded into cattle wagons and deported "to reconstruction work in the USSR." There, 1.700 km away from home, in the coal mines of the Donbas region, my uncle fell ill and died, my paternal grandfather committed suicide, and my maternal grandfather and his sister lived for years in despair, hunger, homesickness. This memory laboratory at the coalmine in Petrila became for me an opportunity to symbolically close a circle in history and make peace with my family's past.
“Minus 36” - I created the installation for the 30 years anniversary of the 1989 Revolution in Timisoara/ Romania. According to a report broadcasted on the Romanian national television, 47 children died during the events in 1989 in Romania. The youngest victim was from Bucharest and had turned one month exactly on December 23, 1989. In the list published at the end of the report, only 36 names were mentioned. I could not find clearer information about the number of children who lost their lives then, only accounts of the dramatic circumstances in which some of them were killed. But numbers are relative. Even ONE, in this case, is one too much ... Because the immense pain of the Mother is the same ... and mourning can only be forever, as they will remain, forever, the Children of the Revolution.
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