The presence of absence

Architecture provides a glimpse into history, as Prague amply demonstrates, but what happens when that history is demolished?

Spanish artist Juan Garaizabal, recently in Prague to install his ongoing exhibition The Wandering Church at DOX, confronts this question by recreating the frames of demolished buildings like the Royal Palace of Valencia and the Old City of Bucharest, both of which held precious memories for local inhabitants.

Garaizabal began working with these structures after he witnessed the reaction of people in Bucharest to Nicolae Ceausescu's destruction of the old city.

"I am not interested in sculpture on a grand scale, for the masses. I believe in dreams. We need them in our lives," he says.

The Wandering Church recreates the Bohemian Bethlehem Church (Böhmische-Bethlehemskirche), completed in Berlin in 1737. This church that once stood in the center of Berlin was an important meeting place for the Czech community until it was bombed during World War II.

Understanding the Presence I, II, III and IV portray the Bohemian Bethlehem Church in its original state. After the Berlin Wall fell, the former site of this church was discovered, and Garaizabal marked out the foundations on the ground.

Garaizabal says he likes to create art that is personal and includes contrasting characteristics of fragility and solidity. His delicate framework of the church seems to sketch the original building, with only small concrete plinths resting on a reflective mirror surface, which Garaizabal says "gives you the impression of being under the 30-meter-tall structure in an open-air place."

A purple light attached to the metallic structures, which reverberate with sound, helps Garaizabal fill the gaps in his pieces with the linear presence of a building and the associated energies he calls "urban memory."

Joanna Ransome can be reached at
features@praguepost.com