Prosthetic re[member]ing: a museum and memorial park honoring the lived-experiences of the internees and guards held in the internment camps at Andalusia farm (Jan Kempdorp) during WWII
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Date
2022
Authors
Coetzer, Waldo
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of the Free State
Abstract
Facing the inevitable waning of memory, the internment camp of WWII near Jan Kempdorp falls victim to its own temporality. The forgetting of these atrocities against humanity during war times facilitate the ruination of the sites that currently lay bare as the act of forgetting leads to the degradation that memory is inevitably subjected to. This dissertation aims to investigate how the lived experience of the prisoners held in these camps can be reconciled through a palimpsest of trace-d etchings augmented into a monumental present-scape honoring the fallen prisoners of war, irrespective of their allegiances but rather for their fragmented lived experience. It hopes to simultaneously re-dress the thresholds occupying the site and the neighboring communities, in the form of an internment-museum and public park space. Through the utilization of prosthetic memory instruments, the act of recollection and re-figuration of memories gathered in the captive’s experiences, as well as the engagement generated from the introduction of an introspective play-act, the dweller lends themselves to a form of devotion towards the memory, and the realm of architectural essence. The essence dwells within the realm of the corporeal, rarely visibly observed but constantly contained within a shell, ensnared and forced to the internment of the being it occupies. However, within the being lies a thought, a dedication to the imagination and the residual body that once was. The thought relies on the trace, and the acknowledgment to the existence of a previous architectural presence ensnared within the current. The intervention further seeks to create moments of interaction with the memories and the senses through interactive games played by children in modern society that found their origin in everyday life and war times, much like the games the soldiers would play as a past time to keep them occupied as the games allow for the essence and the presence of the imagined body to dwell in a synchronized realm . The thought is concretized as an interposed image of the presence, allowing for a brief moment of passage between the boundaries that separates fact and memory.
Description
Dissertation (M.Arch. (Architecture))--University of the Free State, 2022
Keywords
Trace, play, memory, internment, recollection