Remembering the past, constructing the future. The Memorial to the Deportation in Paris and experimental commemoration after the Second World War

This study investigates mid-20th-century non-figurative commemorative strategies, schemes that did not merely employ traditional, non-figurative commemorative designs, such as plaques, pyramids and obelisks, but that invented new forms or recombined or reconceptualized older forms in a way that provided what I call experimental solutions with a focus on viewer interaction. George-Henri Pingusson's Memorial to the Deportation in Paris is the dissertation's main case study through which I reach other examples, primarily the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome, BBPR's Monument to the Victims of the Concentration Camps in Milan and Max Bill's unbuilt contribution to the Institute of Contemporary Arts' international competition for a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner. All four projects were designed within ten years of the end of World War II and together, in all likelihood, represent the most radical memorialization efforts in the immediate postwar period. Viewing memorials as cultural products determined by political, social and economic circumstances, my questions concerned the particular status of memorial construction at the crossroads of aesthetic debates and political and cultural realities in the immediate postwar era, an interdisciplinary approach through which the memorials could be inserted into the intricate web of postwar debates on New Monumentality, the synthesis of the arts, and related themes of abstraction and figuration. I argue that experimental memorials in many instances constituted an opportunity for monumental expression in this period, a category that successfully combined the quest for a new type of monumentality with collaborative synthetic ventures. A memorial such as the Memorial to the Deportation crosses the boundaries between art and architecture in ways that predate many other memorial efforts. The complex treatment of materials, the contrasting use of light and darkness, and the manipulation of space through carefully choreographed circulation seek to evoke a visceral response in the visitor. As it defies traditional definitions of sculpture and architecture, the memorial stands as an early example of a case where viewer interaction is essential to render the work meaningful. The anti-monumental merging of landscape, experiential architecture, and curatorial content further connects the memorial to sequential topographies in more recent architecture.