Kuster’s five-year project was in collaboration with Ruben Samama who produced a sound tract to accompany the one thousand and seventy-eight polaroid images. One image for each known location of every former Nazi concentration camp throughout Europe during the Nazi rule from 1933 – 1945.
In 2019 the exhibition has been in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C and will remain until 2021. The sound track spans 4432 days and gives a single tone for every known victim, in real time, which retraces the actual timeline from the first opening to the liberation.
“Each time this work is shown, an act of conservation has to be made by the institution’s curator. Are they going to show it in a place so that it fades, so that it carries the scars of where it has been shown? Or do we put it in encased concrete so that it is absolutely protected? It’s a commentary on how we deal with memory. If we lock it away, it might be protected but never seen. And if we show it, it might fade and evolve into something else entirely.” (Kuster, BJP 2020)
Bibliography
Websites accessed 21/05/2020
https://www.bjp-online.com/2020/02/anton-kusters-the-blue-skies-project/
https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/talks-and-events/watch-artist-talk-anton-kusters
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/articles/carrying-the-weight-of-genocide-through-photography/
Michele Usher 