ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY

We go into a church, the Église des Prêcheurs*

Not being French, I thought that it’s the Église des Pêcheurs**

The church is close to the Rhône

François Hébel has told me

That it was built in the fifteenth century

But that it was secularised at the time of the French Revolution.

So we’re in a secularised church

But the architectural style still calls for a ceremonial visit,

A ceremony of movement, a choreography.

How can an architect, a filmmaker or a contemporary artist integrate this demand for juxtaposition? I’m speaking as the son of Munio Gitai

Weinraub, a modernist architect of the Bauhaus

Who studied and worked

With Mies van der Rohe and Hannes Meyer,

And the son of Efratia Gitai Margalit, who went to Vienna to meet Sigmund

Freud. Two secular intellectuals, then, who advised me to approach

religion judiciously.

So we go into a church

Which is no longer a church, but an exhibition space (that is why we love revolutions)

I’ll be presenting to you my photographic and cinematic work in this shell.

Within these walls, my images will move about

So the viewer can perceive this procession of fragments,

Still and moving images side by side, emerging from different memory strata.

Images which I captured at the Yom Kippur war while being wounded

39 years ago, images which I took from the rescue helicopter,

A photo of Munio at the Bauhaus in Dessau and a studies certificate signed by Mies van der Rohe.

At the same period, a picture of my mother Efratia,

Then a Field Diary filmed in the occupied territories of the West Bank and

Gaza during the first Lebanon War.

Photos and fragments of a place, a hill in the Eastern Mediterranean

Where I was born,

The Carmel.

This work is dedicated to the relationships between an architectural

structure and the stratification of the archeology of memory.

Amos Gitai

Video editing with the help of Isabelle Ingold, Ben Gitai, Marie-José

Sanselme and Laurent Truchot.